UNRAID GPU Passthrough – needed a tweak

To get my NVidia GT710 to passthrough to a Windows VM in UNRAID I had to tweak my boot options. I needed to add “video=efifb:off” to the UNRAID OS boot config. Now the GPU passes through no problems.

Windows 10 Nvidia nForce RAID Update Troubles

So a resent update caused no end of problems with my Windows 10 machine. It would repeatedly fail to install the update, and then when it managed it I couldn’t log into the machine. User profile not accessible. I decided that it was probably time to re-install my machine anyway. However it seems the problem came back. A little different this time.

I reinstalled but chose to leave my Nvidia Soft/Fake RAID partition unchanged as I used it as my user space. The machine re-installed, and everything appeared to be fine. I could get to the RAID array, so I left it as is and went about installing drivers and updates. Updates! This is the problem. It seems I have become one of the many victims of a Windows 10 update that stops Nvidia RAID arrays from working (see here in German). So no sooner had I updated the machine and restarted, the RAID array vanished again. So annoying. This machine is a little old but it is by no means obsolete. Its a dual quad-core opteron with 16GB of ram and a half decent GPU. Plenty of live left in it yet, esp as all I use it for is scanning and printing photographs. The RAID array still reports as healthy at boot. I suppose I should have known not to trust a fake/soft RAID long term. However, wasn’t expecting an update to do it in. So what to do… Buy a cheap RAID card off ebay and use that, turn off Nvidia RAID and use the Windows fake RAID instead? Whatever, they should have warned us of this potential if they knew.

Opensuse 12.3 KDE login/nvidia issues

I updated Opensuse 12.3 the other day. Caused a few issues, one was repeated crashes on login to KDE. I seem to have fixed it by adding my user to the ‘video’ group. These is also a fix for the following error.

GL applications report that they can’t operate /dev/nvidiactl.

I have had this error with certain applications trying to use the binary Nvidia drivers. Not sure if the fix is complete yet as the system seems to be a little bit sluggish and if I try to open nvidia-settings it doesn’t work. I will update when I have more info. I might re-install the nvidia drivers and see if that helps.

Update: So nvidia-settings does work, it just takes ages to open.