December 18, 200817 yr In view of the fact that many of us are trying to add features specific to OUR requirements (or rather, desires) to unRaid and so many ways of "bending the system" have to be implemented, or others running unRaid in a full slackware environment, it would seem that one simple addition to the unRaid distribution would greatly simplify these efforts, and I don't believe it would compromise any of Tomm's excellant yet private efforts... Tomm, could you please add your Linux install config file for the distribution released?
December 18, 200817 yr In view of the fact that many of us are trying to add features specific to OUR requirements (or rather, desires) to unRaid and so many ways of "bending the system" have to be implemented, or others running unRaid in a full slackware environment, it would seem that one simple addition to the unRaid distribution would greatly simplify these efforts, and I don't believe it would compromise any of Tomm's excellant yet private efforts... Tomm, could you please add your Linux install config file for the distribution released? Are you talking about the kernel .config file ? I thought this was included as part of the unRAID distro along woth the md.c driver code in /usr/src/linux. or are you talking about the file in /var/log/packages ?
December 18, 200817 yr The linux .config is there in /usr/src/linux. If you mean the packages, that isn't possible since the creation of the initramfs is not built that way... files are manually included or excluded, not based on packages. For example, there are many utility commands, like cron, but no man pages for cron. I've said this before, although the instructions to install unRAID on a full Slackware distro has many STEPS, it is not very hard to do it. I wrote the instructions on how to do it with much more detail than was really necessary, in order to do as much hand-holding as possible. Once you have unRAID installed on a full Slackware distro, the sky is the limit for adding applications. Once you do it, you will wonder why you ever futzed around with the other ways of customizing unRAID. Upgrades are not that bad either. To upgrade to 4.4, all I had to do was 1) download the 2.6.27.7 kernel source 2) copy the unRAID md mods to the kernel source tree 3) copy my old .config to the new tree, and run make oldconfig 4) compare my .config to the unRAID distro .config, and make appropriate changes (such as SMP) 5) recompile the kernel. Is it more work than booting off the flash with stock unRAID? yup... but most things worth having are worth a little extra work. And remember, even if you install unRAID on a full Slackware distro, you can still simply boot from the unRAID flash at any time, and be back to "stock" in an emergency.
December 20, 200817 yr Author Let me ask a new question, based on the answers above.... my system is an AB9pro, 12 1tb drives on seperate PCIe lanes, q6600 quad core, 8 gb DDR2-800... I want to basicly run unraid and vmware and possibly a native music server on the box... the VM's will be media servers, a development environment, and a TV recording backend using either myth or SAGE... now, would I get better performance if I started with unRaid and added vmware over making a full distro?
December 20, 200817 yr Performance will be the same... It's maintainability that will be different. With a full slackware installed, all the tools and installed packages are static and stay the same between reboots. Using the root ram method requires a number of tweaks to get the packages, libs and configs re-installed upon reboot. What media server are you considering? What can be done is putting the slackware install on a cache drive as long as you use a partition other then 1. Remember tom's response to using other partitions on the cache drive?
December 20, 200817 yr You will be much better off installing a full Slack distro and adding unRAID to it. As Webo said, you can partition a cache drive and install Slackware and a swap partition on it, as long as they don't use the #1 partition.... install Lilo to the MBR. In an emergency, you can still just boot from the unRAID flash and have a stock unRAID system running. Include KDE when you install Slack, and then you can use VNC and do remote control of the KDE desktop.... trust me, with all the stuff you want to add, you'll need it.
December 21, 200817 yr Author thanks... a full distro it will be... now... for the question of the day.... has anyone tried/considered adding unraid to a 64 bit slack distro such as BlueWhite 64 or SlamD64 ??
December 23, 200817 yr You gotta be kidding... right? There are probably less than 10 people who have ever run unRAID on a full Slack distro, and I can say with a high degree of confidence none of them did it on 64-bit. More to the point, what would be the point of doing it? Nothing in a 64-bit OS would help unRAID, and I can't imagine the handful of programs compiled for a 64-bit OS could help, would be on your plate. If, for some reason you needed 64-bit, you can run the latest VirtualBox on 32-bit Slackware as host, and run 64-bit Linux in the VM.
December 23, 200817 yr Author You gotta be kidding... right? Not at all... It would seem natural to have the machine run 64 bit and vmware/virtualbox in 64 bit... It can't hurt to try
December 23, 200817 yr It would seem natural... Uhhh... no it wouldn't Do you even know what 64-bit OS gets you over a 32-bit OS? .... you get to use more than 4GB of RAM (The maximum of addressable RAM on a 32 bit system is 2^32 which is 4GB.). Double-precision math is faster and you can efficiently use longer ints. That's about it. It can't hurt to try Oh yes it can. Compatibility. Stack space. Troubleshooting.... all for zero benefit.
December 23, 200817 yr Author .... you get to use more than 4GB of RAM Exactly.... the box has 8gb.... for VM space... Not looking for an argument just askin'...
December 23, 200817 yr Just how many VMs do you plan to run, and what OSes? Most All of my VMs are under 200M, and I rarely get pushed into anything but trivial amounts of swap. Large footprint VMs are rarely need in such environments. But to answer your question, nobody I know has ever done it, or ever had a need/desire to do it.... you'll be on your own.
December 24, 200817 yr Don't get me wrong.... 64-bit OS has its place, as does >4GB of RAM. For many years, I had two used for process control simulations at work. A 64-bit OS for an unRAID server with 5 or 6 VMs is a sledgehammer to swat a fly. Remember, we are not in a flat memory model any more. With your new system you will have swap space, and each process has access to private userland space of 2GB that can be swapped out. So 4GB of RAM, plus 8 GB of swap will give you 10GB of userland space for VMs, even on a 32-bit OS. The only difference with a 64-bit OS in this regard, is each single process is limited to 2GB shared plus 2GB of private memory space. Only if you need a single process to have access to more than 4GB do you need a 64-bit OS in this regard. Make sense?
December 24, 200817 yr Good! So if you don't need a single VM with more than 4GB, you will be fine with 32-bit OS. When you install Slackware, just fdisk the cache/OS/swap drive before going into setup. Also, after you get the system running the way you want it, dd | gzip the OS partition for a backup. Then if your boot drive fails, you can put in a new drive, boot unRAID from flash, and dd the image of the OS partition back to your new boot drive.
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