Trying Out The BSDs & OpenIndiana On AMD EPYC + Tyan 2U Server

[Michael]

Michael
Would love to see some OmniOS CE benches. Maybe you are more successful with it because it's newer than OI.

Tried the latest OmniOS this morning and still couldn't detect the NVMe storage.

[MolallaComm]

That fix must not have made it into OmniOS CE yet either. Gea reports you can edit /kernel/drv/nvme.conf and turn off version checking which will probably fix it - but to do that I think you'd have to install to SATA or USB stick first - make the edit - then reboot off that media and hopefully the U.2 disks will show up.

The likely fix apparently isn't yet in any of the derivative distros:

https://www.illumos.org/issues/8239

The work around:

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/samsung-960-nvme-on-napp-it-for-cache.14398/#post-137987

Just out of curiosity, what kind of U.2 drives did Tyan send in the unit? If you get it working - i'd love to see some numbers for maybe a pool with no parity (i.e. 24 drives striped) - and maybe a pool with 4 vdevs in raidz with 5 drives each (20 drives) or 4 vdevs in raidz2 with 6 drives each (24 drives).

[aht0]

DragonFlyBSD 5.0 RC2 - The next DragonFly release is coming soon. Unfortunately, when booting the USB-based RC2 image, the system would immediately reboot. But this appears to be some issue that is not EPYC specific as I have encountered this behavior with other (Intel) systems too.

Might be issue with the USB image. Installed and booted fine using DVDRW media (Intel s1150 system, EFI install).

Now, if I could get Kodi to compile on it.. It'd be bunch of fun with Hammer 2

[jollyd]

Tried the latest OmniOS this morning and still couldn't detect the NVMe storage.

Michael OmniOS' and OpenIndiana's illumos versions are basically the same except for the LX brand code so unfortunately it was bound to happen. If you have more info about the issue, I can forward to illumos devs.

Yoshi I guess you meant that OmniOS CE ISOs were created more recently. OpenIndiana builds the latest illumos-gate on a daily basis while OmniOS can update the OmniOS LX patches on top of illumos gate less frequently. Aside from the LX brand both OS are very similar with three main differences:
- OmniOS security updates are released on a fixed schedule and may not require reboot (which may be required on OpenIndiana since the kernel is updated every day).
- OpenIndiana applies security fixes more often as they pop out.
- OpenIndiana has more integrated software including database/web/mail/development and Xorg (and we tend to patch more to cope with platform specific issues)

Basically build/install illumos-omnios on OpenIndiana, stop updating the kernel every day, and you have about the same system.

[jollyd]

New OpenIndiana ISOs will be released tomorrow.
In general if there is a need for more recent ISOs you can just ask to produce testing images.