Hi folks. Long time follower of l1t, first time poster.
I recently got frustrated with a few things around my house:
My TV - LG C9 (2019) doesn’t have the horsepower to pull a uncompressed bluray stream via DLNA.
My poor Optiplex 780 absolutely can’t cut it anymore when it comes to hosting HomeAassistant, Samba and qBittorrent (because of full disk encryption and lack of AES)
I want to add more services around my house while honing my helm-chart-fu, so I need a kubernetes cluster.
Why not go for a odroid cluster?
Price. Looks like going a single box cluster with 128GB ECC memory is cheaper. Wild.
Graphics on a Windows guest for emulation and light gaming (HDR, vsync and other considerations)
So, purpose of this new build I’m thinking about:
KVM linux host
Windows Media guest that uses the APU (jellyfin server, emulators, media in general)
Linux guest(s) - most likely a single-node k3s cluster
Ideal hardware setup:
Passthrough the APU to the windows guest
3xNVME in raidz1 ZFS pool for the guests
2xSSD in RAID1 for the Hypervisor OS
I’m playing around with this build (updated):
My primary asks here are:
Is APU passthrough even possibe? (big ticket item)
What MOBO Manufacturers and/or model series are known to have a good IOMMU layout?
How reliable are mobo RAID modes (RAID1?)
Can I get away with a B650 chipset? Maybe a better questiuon is what chipset should I go for given my previous questions and desired setup.
I would very much appreciate any feedback. Thanks folks!
As for motherboad choice, I took a look at the following thread. Specifically, this post is a good hint at what I should be looking at. Looks like B650 is the way to go for now:
I eagerly await the news of someone who can do that. I’ve tried with two different AM5 motherboards and Ryzen 7000 series CPUs without luck. The iGPU refuses to be passed through on Proxmox and in Ubuntu’s Virtual Machine Manager (both using underlying KVM).
This is such a bummer. A lot of horse power and utility that’s available but unusable. I might have to go back to the drawing board and think of a different approach because it’s too risky to try and do something nobody has done yet.
My contingency plan (which haven’t attempted yet) is to use the iGPU from LXC containers (which do not require pass-through). That’d make use of the iGPU for non-GUI applications, though I’ve heard stranger things such as running Ubuntu desktop within an LXC container. That would obviously not help with running Windows using the iGPU, but depending on your use cases’ specifics, maybe you can!
Windows would be hooked up to the LG C9 TV which supports HDR/4k/120hz/gsync.
TV specs make it a better match for windows because I want to throw emulation, light gaming, media playback and media serving (with transcode) I think Linux is close to being a solid replacement, but I want something that works better with all those things bundled.
If someone says “you don’t need 4K OLED for emulation” - you haven’t seen the new HLSL/GLSL filters that emulate CRTs on 4K displays… my god. OLED helps because of the extra brightness it provides. gsync/freesnyc also helps with frame-perfect accuracy (on emulators where that’s a thing).
I will probably explore options on how to output picture from my gaming PC that’s located literally a floor above where the TV is mounted. One of those fiber optic solutions or copper if possible.
And then I’ll just build a low-power single cluster box where I really don’t care too much about IOMMU at all.
I wil be really miffed if it doesn’t work because it’s the only Asus recommended ECC ram on the support page of the motherboard. (It also supports the 16GB per stick version)
Looks like I will start getting stuff in late February, early March.
Like you, I’m interested in this APU. Did you end up testing if it is possible to pass through the iGPU or did you give up after discovering ECC is not supported?
I am wondering if SR-IOV can be enabled at all.
