I have unRAID running on an i3-8100b Mac Mini (2018 model).

I wanted to build the smallest rig possible - previously I'd considered a mini-ITX board in an Inwin Chopin case with HDDs in a Kingwin 

MKS-535TL enclosure connected via SATA cables hanging out of the case.

 

I know I'm risking HDD drop-outs with them being connected via USB3 to SATA cables (HDDs are in the Kingwin enclosure) but I'll continue monitoring for a few days, and so far so good.

 

I formatted the internal nvme to be used as cache, and this has the benefit of forcing the Mac to boot from USB automatically 🙂

 

I have managed to get a Win10 VM running with IGD passthrough (VFIO-PCI machine i440fx-6.1, SeaBIOS, GPU ROM from https://github.com/patmagauran/i915ovmfPkg) but the audio is on a separate IOMMU group and I can't pass it/them through. I will try downstream and multifunction PCIe ACS override settings shortly, hopefully the 1f.3 device will be freed up for passthrough.

IOMMU group 10:
    [8086:a30e] 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake LPC Controller (rev 10)
 	[8086:a348] 00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH cAVS (rev 10)
 	[8086:a323] 00:1f.4 SMBus: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH SMBus Controller (rev 10)
 	[8086:a324] 00:1f.5 Serial bus controller [0c80]: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH SPI Controller (rev 10)
IOMMU group 11:
    [106b:2005] 02:00.0 Mass storage controller: Apple Inc. ANS2 NVMe Controller (rev 01)
        [N:0:0:1]    disk    APPLE SSD AP0128M__1                       /dev/nvme0n1   121GB
 	[106b:1801] 02:00.1 Non-VGA unclassified device: Apple Inc. T2 Bridge Controller (rev 01)
 	[106b:1802] 02:00.2 Non-VGA unclassified device: Apple Inc. T2 Secure Enclave Processor (rev 01)
 	[106b:1803] 02:00.3 Multimedia audio controller: Apple Inc. Apple Audio Device (rev 01)

 

Just thought I'd post here to see if others have tried a Mac Mini with unRAID.

I've used vfio-bind on all devices in IOMMU group 10 and passed through the audio device to the Win10 VM, and it's all working perfectly.

[8086:a348] 00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH cAVS (rev 10)

 

If the USB3 to SATA cables continue without issue this might be an option for anyone wanting a tiny unRAID setup.

Edited January 21, 20224 yr by Zan
Working with IOMMU group 10

That's really interesting and strange in some way!, thank you for sharing this, I didn't know SMBus and Serial bus controller could be attached to vfio (??)...

I still can't understand how the smbus of the host can be attached to vfio...

Hello @Zan I know this is an old post but do you have some update on your build? 

@ZanWhat steps did you go through to get the 2018 mac mini to boot USB flash with Unraid?  I have a flash that has been updated to 7.0.0 beta2 and it boots via EFI on a couple of other Unraid systems, so I know that works.