Is ARM support anywhere in the making?

[FlyingTexan]

Is ARM support being worked on? I’d really like to change everything with my setup and switch to the Mac Minis to run everything.

[prostuff1]

24 minutes ago, FlyingTexan said:

and switch to the Mac Minis to run everything.

 

Going to ask a stupid question... why?

 

I assume you want to connect all your drives via USB/Thunderbolt docks... but again why?

 

To me the point of the NAS is that it is all self contained, as much as possible, to the point where I do not have to grab a bunch of docks hanging off the computer.

[FlyingTexan]

Because it’s 40watts all in and modernized. 

[Lolight]

6 hours ago, FlyingTexan said:

Is ARM support being worked on?

 

Because it’s 40watts all in and modernized. 

IMO ARM support is probably the last thing the devs would ever consider to work on.

 

btw, these x86 SBCs are already super efficient.

And they've also been tested on Unraid:

 

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h3/

Edited January 20, 2023 by Lolight

[FlyingTexan]

11 hours ago, Lolight said:

IMO ARM support is probably the last thing the devs would ever consider to work on.

 

btw, these x86 SBCs are already super efficient.

And they've also been tested on Unraid:

 

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h3/

How many 4k streams can that transcode at once? Does it have hardware accelerated video editing capabilities? Baked in Bluetooth support? Offer syncing with iPhones, MacBooks? From here that looks like a piece of junk that’s 1/4 the power on a good day and isn’t modernized at all.   I don’t want that.  I asked about ARM support because a Mac mini is better in every single way compared to that thing you posted and has a ton of capability, integration, and quality components baked in. It’s very power, efficient, and perfect for my use cases.

Edited January 20, 2023 by FlyingTexan

[Lolight]

On 1/21/2023 at 12:04 AM, FlyingTexan said:

I asked about ARM support because a Mac mini is better in every single way...

Well, the reality is Lime Technology is a very small company.

Do you really think they can spare any manpower/resources on an enormous task of porting x86 Unraid to ARM?

 

At the moment Apple's M-series controls just 13% of the PC market by sales (Q3 2022).

Yes, they have grandiose plans to increase that share to 30% in a couple of years.

My assumption is If that projection becomes reality then Lime Tech might "consider" looking at that market niche.

 

Would be interesting to read from someone "in the know" what are their thoughts on the topic.

[Interstellar]

It seems to be that your requirements are far off what a NAS is expected to do.

 

Talking about Bluetooth / iPhone integration, it’s a NAS, why would you need that?

 

Perfectly possible to build a low power NAS to do the 4K transcoding bit. Won’t be as low power as a Mini but that’s one of the great things about AS.

 

 

Edited January 22, 2023 by Interstellar

[FlyingTexan]

On 1/22/2023 at 3:34 AM, Interstellar said:

It seems to be that your requirements are far off what a NAS is expected to do.

 

Talking about Bluetooth / iPhone integration, it’s a NAS, why would you need that?

 

Perfectly possible to build a low power NAS to do the 4K transcoding bit. Won’t be as low power as a Mini but that’s one of the great things about AS.

 

 

What’s funny is I have an 11600k in it currently and it always has a core pegged doing something with Plex thumbnails or detecting intros. Playing a file isn’t hard. I never said NAS, if I’d wanted that I’d have just bought an actual NAS box. But I wanted more and I do more heavy lifting with mine than any Nas could do. There are people running VMs, gaming servers, etc. I don’t know why people insist on giving me their opinions on a question I didn’t ask. I simply asked in the pre-sales forum if they were looking at ARM support. It was a yes or no question for the people in sales. I shouldn’t have to defend why I’d like to see it.  I think a lot of people would be running it that way. Just because you don’t see a reason for me to use time-machine to backup all my devices doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have a use for it.  

[FlyingTexan]

On 1/21/2023 at 10:23 PM, Lolight said:

Well, the reality is Lime Technology is a very small company.

Do you really think they can spare any manpower/resources on an enormous task of porting x86 Unraid to ARM?

 

At the moment Apple's M-series controls just 13% of the PC market by sales (Q3 2022).

Yes, they have grandiose plans to increase that share to 30% in a couple of years.

My assumption is If that projection becomes reality then Lime Tech might "consider" looking at that market niche.

 

Would be interesting to read from someone "in the know" what are their thoughts on the topic.

Smaller groups have already ported Linux over. Percentage of market share doesn’t matter when the market is 350+million a year

[primeval_god]

1 hour ago, FlyingTexan said:

I simply asked in the pre-sales forum if they were looking at ARM support.

As far as any of us in the forums know the answer is no. Limetech tends to be fairly tight-lipped about their roadmap and which features they are considering. That said arm support in linux distros is far from ubiquitous at this point and tends to introduce a myriad of platform specific issues. It seems like it might be a quite a challenge for  a team as small as Limetech to implement and support.

 

1 hour ago, FlyingTexan said:

It was a yes or no question for the people in sales. 

Unfortunately, due to their size, getting the attention of a Limetech employee on this forum can sometimes be difficult. Much of the time well meaning members of the community step in to answer questions, with varying amounts of tact.

 

1 hour ago, FlyingTexan said:

I never said NAS, if I’d wanted that I’d have just bought an actual NAS box.

 UnRAID is first and foremost a Home NAS Appliance OS. While it does have a lot of capabilities beyond that of many home NAS solutions (thought VM and Docker support are quickly becoming par for the course for most NAS solutions), it is simply not designed to be a fully generic linux server distro. So many people come to the forums asking "why cant unRAID do X that another server distro can do" that sometimes our first instinct is to ask what they are trying to accomplish to determine if unRAID is even the right tool for the job.

[Interstellar]

4 hours ago, FlyingTexan said:

What’s funny is I have an 11600k in it currently and it always has a core pegged doing something with Plex thumbnails or detecting intros. Playing a file isn’t hard. I never said NAS, if I’d wanted that I’d have just bought an actual NAS box. But I wanted more and I do more heavy lifting with mine than any Nas could do. There are people running VMs, gaming servers, etc. I don’t know why people insist on giving me their opinions on a question I didn’t ask. I simply asked in the pre-sales forum if they were looking at ARM support. It was a yes or no question for the people in sales. I shouldn’t have to defend why I’d like to see it.  I think a lot of people would be running it that way. Just because you don’t see a reason for me to use time-machine to backup all my devices doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have a use for it.  

 

Firstly, you're posting on a UnRAID forum. UnRAID is, at the core, a NAS. Hence you'd forgive the people who know it as NAS software assuming that you'd use it... as a NAS. It'd be interesting if anyone uses it as a non-NAS but I've not come across anyone doing so, I'm sure there are a few, but I'd guess less than a few %.

 

Secondly, regarding Plex - Unless I'm transcoding/generating Thumbnails/etc Plex uses <1% on average. If Plex is using one-core 24/7 then you have something wrong. If you're regularly transcoding 4K for streaming then a GPU would be significantly faster and more efficient than a CPU. GTX1050/RX5600/RX6600 idle at a couple of watts for example and the latter certainly have the ability to transcode 4K H265.

 

Thirdly, getting to your question - The NAS ARM hardware market is, frankly, non-existent. I'm not sure if there is any ARM NAS stuff out there outside of some very niche things. Hence UnRAID won't, until there is actual ARM NAS hardware available, bother to convert it over.

 

3 hours ago, FlyingTexan said:

Smaller groups have already ported Linux over. Percentage of market share doesn’t matter when the market is 350+million a year

 

Yes they have started working on Linux for AS, but is it a fully fledged, 100% performant and stable distro yet? I'm fairly sure the answer is no.

 

Linux on ARM vs Linux on AS is a completely different kettle of fish. It'll be years before something like Ubuntu works natively on AS as well as it does on x86.

 

 

So in summary: Zero current business case for ARM, let alone AS.

 

Edited January 23, 2023 by Interstellar

[itimpi]

There is also the fact that Limetech have plenty of new features planned for current Unraid that I could easily taking a few years to come to completion without any distractions like trying to support a new platform.

[primeval_god]

23 minutes ago, Interstellar said:

Thirdly, getting to your question - The NAS ARM hardware market is, frankly, non-existent. I'm not sure if there is any ARM NAS stuff out there outside of some very niche things. 

This is actually incorrect. Many of the lower to mid range off the shelf NAS solutions do in fact have ARM chips. QNAP, Synology, Western Digital, TerraMaster all offer both ARM and x86/x64 based NAS devices depending on price-point.

 

Which is not to say that many people are running unRAID on off the shelf NAS boxes. Just that ARM based NAS hardware is not unheard of.

Edited January 23, 2023 by primeval_god

[Interstellar]

1 hour ago, primeval_god said:

This is actually incorrect. Many of the lower to mid range off the shelf NAS solutions do in fact have ARM chips. QNAP, Synology, Western Digital, TerraMaster all offer both ARM and x86/x64 based NAS devices depending on price-point.

 

Which is not to say that many people are running unRAID on off the shelf NAS boxes. Just that ARM based NAS hardware is not unheard of.

I don't include those embedded type things - What I meant was you can’t go out and buy a ARM motherboard/CPU combo from Amazon and plug 4 SATA HDDs into them, which is what I meant. 👍

 

Edit: Seems there is the odd thing floating about...

From 10 years ago..!:  https://www.gigabyte.com/Enterprise/Server-Motherboard/MP30-AR0-rev-11

Also this is starting to look like something that you'd really run UnRAID on: https://en.t-firefly.com/product/industry/itx3588j But can't find it for sale anywhere even nearly a year later.

 

 

So I'm going to stick with my statement that you can't currently buy anything that you'd want to install UnRAID on thus no business case.

Edited January 23, 2023 by Interstellar

[primeval_god]

30 minutes ago, Interstellar said:

I don't include those embedded type things - What I meant was you can’t go out and buy a ARM motherboard/CPU combo from Amazon and plug 4 SATA HDDs into them, which is what I meant. 👍

 

Edit: Seems there are things coming along g: https://www.gigabyte.com/Enterprise/Server-Motherboard/MP30-AR0-rev-11

 

But the only reference to price was $1000 and I can't seem to find anywhere to buy it, so the basic point remains. The amount of hardware out there that people would buy and would want to install UnRAID on is still fractions of a % so no business case.

Understood, however it does seem like the question "can i run unRAID on my QNAP/Synology/etc" comes up quite often. While not the most common there are some cases of people running unRAID on the x86 version of some off the shelf NAS devices. It seems likely that the majority of home NAS devices in the wild are off the shelf "embedded" units rather than the custom boxes we build. 

 

In fact I was seriously considering buying one of those off the shelf x86 4 bay devices to run unRAID on for a backup server a few months ago. I was having a terrible time finding any small 4bay itx cases for a custom build and those units were looking like my best option. I did end up finding what i needed for a custom itx build however.

Edited January 23, 2023 by primeval_god

[Kilrah]

7 hours ago, FlyingTexan said:

Smaller groups have already ported Linux over.

AFAIK there is one distro and after 2 years it's only in alpha stage. It's going to take years until there is a stable linux distro for AS if it ever happens, and that would be a prerequisite for porting something like unraid to it even if the will was there...

 

Edited January 24, 2023 by Kilrah

[ich777]

19 hours ago, FlyingTexan said:

I simply asked in the pre-sales forum if they were looking at ARM support. It was a yes or no question for the people in sales. I shouldn’t have to defend why I’d like to see it.  I think a lot of people would be running it that way.

As far as I know no, hope that answers your question.

 

 

A few things to keep in mind:

Even if the M-Chip powered Mac Minis are about 40W you have to add power for external storage devices if you want to use it like some kind of NAS and that's maybe why someone recommended a Odroid SBC because for a low power NAS such a board makes much more sense because of the built in SATA ports and expandable storage.

 

Another thing is that not every application on DockerHub has a ARM version and building a translation layer like Rosetta for the M-Chips on Linux must be done first to support x86_64, of course you could maybe use QEMU and run a VM on your M-Chip powered Mac Mini for your x86_64 Docker applications but that kind of defeats the purpose of Docker.

Besides that there are also multiple ARM revisions out there, v7 and arm64 are the most common ones, every application has to be compiled for each individual ARM version and created a Docker container for, not to speak that the M-Chips also have some kind of special sauce (instructions) which can be maybe used to further improve performance <- since there is no documentation on these chips no one has knowledge how they are working and everything has to be reverse engineered.

 

I looked myself into that and what is possible with a bit more powerful ARM hardware than a RaspberryPi on Linux, but it turns out that you can't do much because of lacking support (especially Rockchip) for Linux.

Transcoding is a bit rough (no support for the SBC that I used back then) and the container maintainers would need to implement every codec/dependency to support each individual ARM GPU <- this is in my opinion a really convoluted space.

 

ARM is cool tech indeed and can be of course be power efficient but consumer based powerful ARM hardware that is truly Linux compatible is not released as of today AFAIK, please correct me if I'm wrong about that, of course except for M-Chip powered Macs but these are not really of better speaking fully Linux compatible, at least not as time of writing.

 

From my perspective ARM needs to establish itself a bit more and needs to be more widespread in the consumer space to become a viable option, especially for some kind of NAS with lots of storage and transcoding capabilities.

 

I would really hear what your thoughts are about that, please keep in mind that these are my personal opinions on ARM powered hardware and how far they are as of time of writing.

[GRRRRRRR]

So we should hit them all with Right to Repair action?

 

We must fight for the right to run Linux on everything !!!!

[FlyingTexan]

On 1/23/2023 at 2:39 PM, Interstellar said:

 

Firstly, you're posting on a UnRAID forum. UnRAID is, at the core, a NAS. Hence you'd forgive the people who know it as NAS software assuming that you'd use it... as a NAS. It'd be interesting if anyone uses it as a non-NAS but I've not come across anyone doing so, I'm sure there are a few, but I'd guess less than a few %.

 

 

Unraid.net front page. Find the word NAS.... I'll wait.

[jit-010101]

As for someone with really extensive ARM experience ... from ARMv7a to ARM64 SBCs powering RK3399 ... forget ARM.

 

No matter which SBC, even the Raspberry Pi 4B will ever catch up on the software side.

 

Yes there has been a shit ton of support added, but those are for Server-Boards that are run for example at Amazon, nothing on the consumer side.

 

There are so many issues on a large scale that I can't even begin where to start and why. Linux, BSD ... there's nothing that's really stable.

 

All these consumer ARM platforms have one thing in common and that's cluster-fuck bootloader support - horrible U-Boot (I hate it) and all the crap involved when it comes to Kernels (forget Mainline). You clearly have no clue how hard it would be to add support to an closed source board like the Apple-Devices.

 

I can also warn against using the Odroid H2/H3 boards (had 4 of them testing a Bare Metal Kuberenetes Cluster) - they suffer from the same design issues and limitations that all SBCs and Mini-PCs do:

 

Storage (not only Storage) IO is simply crap as is the Power Circuit design - Stick to Mini-ITX and call it a day.

 

Simply get a Jonsbo N2 + PicoPSU 90W + Leike 90W Power Supply + Mini-ITX board if you want something power efficient.

 

I have wasted SO much time of my life on ARM and x86 SBCs - don't do it ... they will never be stable and you will suffer, if not today then tomorrow or the year after.

 

Maybe RISC-V will change all that one day because it build with Open-Source in mind but ARM will never take off - for that it's way to cluster fucked (even in the Smartphone world).

 

 

Edited August 14, 2023 by jit-010101

[bagican]

I just found this topic. I'm starting with Unraid as new unraider (still in Trial, but I plan to switch to normal license) and I set up Unraid in my Odroid H3. I have no problems so far.

I think H3 is great and very efficient and low-power device. I'm using only SSDs.

@jit-010101 Could you provide more details regarding the problems you are experiencing with the Odroid H3?

[bagican]

My trial expired, I need to buy license now. So far no problems with Odroid H3. It's great and efficient system. Only 3-4 W idle (with SSD only and 12V power).

Here are more details about power usage:

 

Edited January 30 by bagican

[Nirvash]

 

I was watching this Jeff Geerling video, searched if unraid could run on that thing and found this thread... 

 

Looks like that ARM NAS hardware is finally starting to appear, but it's still very far to be consumer hardware. 

 

 

[ich777]

1 hour ago, Nirvash said:

Looks like that ARM NAS hardware is finally starting to appear, but it's still very far to be consumer hardware.

That‘s of course true.

As I wrote above ARM has to become a bit more mainstream in the consumer space but who knows when that happens and if that ever happens… keep an eye out for Risc-V and how that goes…

 

[rgreen83]

The small and low power specs that makes a mac mini interesting is already available in x86 land, https://www.bee-link.com/beelink-gaming-pc-ser7840-19943849-clone-1 this is just one of many examples. It uses 6-10w idle and has upgradeable and user replaceable ram and drives. It's faster than the m2 mac mini, prob about the same as m2 pro. I use these for media servers, desktops, backup servers, application servers etc. The AMD ones are good enough for light gaming and the Intel ones have QuickSync which is great for de/encoding fast and low power.

 

The problem with asking devs to port unraid to the mac mini is less about porting the kernel to ARM and more the issue that the mac mini is not a standard pc that just happens to have an ARM cpu, its a mac and nearly everything in the thing is custom hardware proprietary to apple and unraid being an OS needs to support all of that and apple would not support them if not even be antagonistic to it. There is barely linux ports running on mac mini hardware and those distros are dedicated to specifically that purpose.

 

I agree with ich777 that Risc-V is a lot more interesting than ARM in the next few years as ARM tends to only be found in custom proprietary designs at the consumer level, while Risc-V should be a much more open and standardized platform similar to x86 - it's not because anyone is specifically beholden to the x86 ISA or anti Mac imho.