unraid on Mac Pro 4.1/5.1 kernel panic

[madwyn]

There are other users experiencing the same kernel panic issue when booting unraid on Mac Pro 4.1/5.1 or Mac Mini 2009. I'm hoping unraid team can help to identify and solve this problem.

 

In order to boot unraid on a Mac Pro, you must use the UEFI Boot with unraid. To isolate the issue, I have removed all the hard drives from the machine in later tests.

 

I used a capture card to get a clear output of the kernel panic screenshot attached. I've tried 6.8, 6.8-rc8, 6.8-rc9, they all showed the same kernel panic.

Kernel Panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0) -6

My Mac Pro was able to boot 6.8-rc6/7, as it has a different kernel (5.7) and it gave a slightly different kernel panic output generally removed the register section. I've also tried different USB drives and different USB ports (Mac Pro only has USB 2.0), none of them worked.

Then I tried to append root=/dev/sda1. A little progress lead to a new kernel panic, now it has two error pieces:

devtmpfs: error mounting -2
Kernel panic - not syncing: No working init found.  Try passing init= option to kernel.

Then I booted unraid in VirtualBox and verified that only /sbin/init exists, so I added init=/sbin/init to the kernel parameters. Then it showed a new kernel panic:

Kernel panic - not syncing: Requested init /sbin/init failed (error-2)

I don't feel confident with this error message, so I booted the USB drive in VirtualBox again and it started without a problem.

This is where I'm stuck, could anyone please point where I should go?

Edited January 7, 2020 by madwyn
fixed root issue

[madwyn]

I have also tried other Linux distros, including Fedora and FreeNAS, they all worked without problems.

 

However, I only want to use unraid on this machine.

[JonathanM]

On 1/8/2020 at 5:00 AM, madwyn said:

I have also tried other Linux distros, including Fedora and FreeNAS, they all worked without problems.

 

However, I only want to use unraid on this machine.

Unraid is loosely based on Slackware, so maybe see how that works.

[madwyn]

8 hours ago, jonathanm said:

Unraid is loosely based on Slackware, so maybe see how that works.

Thanks. I'm thinking long term support, even a temporary hack make it working on Mac Pro, I'd have to modify the installation every time when there is a new release which I don't prefer.

 

Today I made some progress, it seems the best way for now is to run unraid in a virtualised environment, such as Proxmox EV.

 

Edited January 10, 2020 by madwyn

[madwyn]

I'm giving up the idea of using a Mac Pro 4.1 as a NAS, the reason is power consumption. The standby for a Mac Pro 4.1 with an Intel L5640 is 100 watts, this is less than ideal.

Edited May 20, 2020 by madwyn

[p928s1984]

I know this is an old thread at this point. I am attempting to setup unraid on an old mac mini i5 . Running into the exact same issues listed above. 
have tried running everything from 6.8.3 - 6.10.0RC1. all of them seem to be having the same issues. 

Did you ever get it working? 

I would love to use unraid, but may have to push it off to a linux distro.