MP 1,1-5,1 Do any of you run Proxmox on your Mac Pro 5,1?

[idealtracks]

I wanted to share an update that I added a virtualized NAS within proxmox on the Mac Pro. I didn't have good luck with "pass-through" using any of the drive controllers I had available--multiple Marvel-based controllers worked initially but later failed under load. I also didn't want to use the Mac's onboard controller as it is limited to SATA2 speeds. After doing my research, I landed on an LSI 9211-8i flashed to "IT mode" (hw raid disabled). This set me back a whopping $38 shipped, including cabling for 8 drives, and plenty are available on ebay at this price. It's been solid long enough now that I've begun prepping my Synology for resell.

 

[flat4]

I wanted to share an update that I added a virtualized NAS within proxmox on the Mac Pro. I didn't have good luck with "pass-through" using any of the drive controllers I had available--multiple Marvel-based controllers worked initially but later failed under load. I also didn't want to use the Mac's onboard controller as it is limited to SATA2 speeds. After doing my research, I landed on an LSI 9211-8i flashed to "IT mode" (hw raid disabled). This set me back a whopping $38 shipped, including cabling for 8 drives, and plenty are available on ebay at this price. It's been solid long enough now that I've begun prepping my Synology for resell.

So you have this installed and a passing thru to proxmox for extra storage or whatever?

 

[ggyimesi]

Hi all, I wanted to revive this thread because lately I've been testing installing the current Proxmox 8.2-1 on a Mac Pro 5,1 (flashed from 4,1). The installation was apparently successful, it was a single-disk ext4 install for testing purposes. However, Proxmox failed to boot, as the initramdisk will not find the root fs, and gets stuck with a kernel panic. It says "list of devices available" and strangely, this list is empty. More strangely, at the grub2 prompt, I am able to ls the LV and I see the device (lvm/pve-root), so I don't understand why initramdisk will not find it. I have tried the "rootdelay" parameter with up to 30 secs, also booted a live distro and chrooted into the Proxmox installation, recreated the ramdisk with update-initramfs and update-grub2. None of these worked, I still get the same error. Has anyone had this problem, or has any tips what to do?

 

[nollimac]

Hi all, I wanted to revive this thread because lately I've been testing installing the current Proxmox 8.2-1 on a Mac Pro 5,1 (flashed from 4,1). The installation was apparently successful, it was a single-disk ext4 install for testing purposes. However, Proxmox failed to boot, as the initramdisk will not find the root fs, and gets stuck with a kernel panic. It says "list of devices available" and strangely, this list is empty. More strangely, at the grub2 prompt, I am able to ls the LV and I see the device (lvm/pve-root), so I don't understand why initramdisk will not find it. I have tried the "rootdelay" parameter with up to 30 secs, also booted a live distro and chrooted into the Proxmox installation, recreated the ramdisk with update-initramfs and update-grub2. None of these worked, I still get the same error. Has anyone had this problem, or has any tips what to do?

Are you using ZFS?

 

[splifingate]

Never tried Prox on the 5,1 (or any other Mac, for that matter); mainly because of the inherently excessive power expenditure. Same holds-true for my Dell dual-Xeon T5500

I sourced a 12th-Gen AlderLake system from CWWK that consumes ~15w

3TB of PCIe-x4 m.2 storage, SATA 6.0, 48GB DDR5, and four 2.5g LAN

The 8 efficiency cores in the AlderLake are more performant than the dual X5675's that are in the Dell/dual x5677's in the 5,1

The CWWK + networking + a DS920 operate within a 50w envelope, <=20% of just the 5,1

Not that I don't enjoy Full-Phat Computing; but, well . . . I'm not trying to run Midjourney in a virt

 

[Project Alice]

Hi all, I wanted to revive this thread because lately I've been testing installing the current Proxmox 8.2-1 on a Mac Pro 5,1 (flashed from 4,1). The installation was apparently successful, it was a single-disk ext4 install for testing purposes. However, Proxmox failed to boot, as the initramdisk will not find the root fs, and gets stuck with a kernel panic. It says "list of devices available" and strangely, this list is empty. More strangely, at the grub2 prompt, I am able to ls the LV and I see the device (lvm/pve-root), so I don't understand why initramdisk will not find it. I have tried the "rootdelay" parameter with up to 30 secs, also booted a live distro and chrooted into the Proxmox installation, recreated the ramdisk with update-initramfs and update-grub2. None of these worked, I still get the same error. Has anyone had this problem, or has any tips what to do?

How was it installed? I had it installed on EFI, not CSM. It was working fine for me. If I remember correctly I was using a USB HDD as the boot device for proxmox (I didn't have any internal disks available as the purpose was an NAS).

 

[ggyimesi]

I am not using ZFS, I chose the "ext4" option as I mentioned, which automatically created an LVM volume group and LVs inside that. The installation was onto a dedicated internal disk for testing purposes. The boot was from a USB stick with the YUMI boot manager, and I believe it was an EFI boot (can the mac pro do anything else?).

 

[Project Alice]

The boot was from a USB stick with the YUMI boot manager, and I believe it was an EFI boot (can the mac pro do anything else?).

The Mac Pro can do CSM or “bios mode” for Windows. This is how Windows XP runs on these Macs, and is usually how people end up installing other operating systems on these things outside Mac OS. This is because on Macs under 2012 the EFI was not quite up to the same standard as uEFI is on PC’s. The 5,1 Mac Pro is pretty decent these days with EFI on the latest firmware, and the use of opencore. Prior to opencore, CSM was the preferred way of getting things working on these things.
That said, I had my installation of proxmox with EFI, and no opencore on the latest firmware.

I’m not sure what YUMI is.

 

[marshmatey]

Yes, sorry. Kinda forgot I posted this thread.

I ended up getting it all setup, pass through working on the card. However, it did not work out.
It started throwing all sorts of errors on my drives, and telling me the drives were bad. It happened within the first week. I bought a new HBA hoping that would fix it. It did not. I then ordered two new drives (as my drives are already around 4 years old, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch if they had failed) the new drives started throwing unrecoverable data errors right off the bat.

Kind of a TL;DR. I migrated back to the older server (HP Z400) and found my drives were all working fine. For some reason the HP seemingly failed (stopped recognizing a couple RAM slots properly). I am now using the Mac Pro, but not with ProxMox. It’s just running TrueNAS on the bare metal. I don’t know if TrueNAS really hated the HBA cards or if it is an issue with ProxMox and PCIe pass through.

That said, ProxMox itself worked beautifully on the Mac Pro. I would say yes, use ProxMox as long as you do not intend to run TrueNas Or anything similar as a guest.

The other VMs were pfsense, and Windows Server 2012 R2. I had no problems using those.
I installed ProxMox using EFI, and everything just worked like it was supposed to as far as ProxMox is concerned. TrueNAS is a very hard OS to virtualize. Some people have done it successfully, but it clearly isn’t a good idea.

For the PCI Pass through was there anything special you had to do to cMPs? I've got one that I want to setup gpu pass through on, but I so far when I've tried to start the VM with the card it just sits a black screen and I'm not sure where to even look for more logs about what's happening