View Full Version : XBMC and Unraid in same box (via Slackware or Virtual Machine?)?
XBMC is a great front end...Unraid is a great file server featuring flexible RAID-5 like functionality. Combining the two would allow for less machines, less energy consumption. Additionally, if enabling multiple XBMC frontends running on the same machine, features such as multiple room (Zone 2-3) media playback or Karoke (http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=28071)could be enabled via analogue/digital outputs allocation. Of course, Bittorrent and Twonky media (http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=729.0) servers can also co-exist with Unraid.
XBMC playback performance is the most sensitive to resource starvation, so any setup must ensure than Unraid does not impose itself on the user's entertainment.
Fortunately, general usage scenarios suggest that Unraid only requires 256 MB of RAM assigned to it in Virtual Machine setup (http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=862.0) and requires little in the way of CPU for file reads. The only time Unraid requires CPU time is for parity generation. If a machine is close to being CPU cycle starved for XBMC playback purposes, a large file write to Unraid (GByte+ backup) may result in media playback issues (stuttering). Potential workaround: Unraid developers have created a 'Performance' scheme where large file parity generation can be delayed. This approach would not only mitigate impact on XBMC playback issues but also speed up Unraid writes.
There are other details, such as VM hardware sharing issues. For example, in a VM implementation both Unraid and XBMC may require dedicated LAN ports and dedicated HDD for least imposing setup. But both XBMC and Unraid can boot off flash and this could be advantageous.
Possible implementations:
1. Slackware
Unraid Slackware Tutorial (http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2073.0)
Unraid Slackware Tutorial link 2 (http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Installing_unRAID_on_a_full_Slackw are_distro)
XBMC Slackware 12.2 thread (http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=42228)
2. Virtual Machine (Unraid hosts VM server) (http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=862.0) Probably all sorts of problems with video playback.
3. VMWare license with XBMC running natively and Virtual Machine for 2nd Audio Only XBMC/Unraid/Other OS - a little money but potentially the most flexible and requires no coding and is DIY. VMWare Server can be booted off USB (http://www.kjctech.net/blog/archive/2008/10/24/boot-vmware-esxi-from-a-usb-flash-drive.aspx), as well as all of the above, so SATA ports on Mini-ITX/Micro-ATX boards could be preserved for Unraid HDD drives and XBMC optical drive.
What would be the result of this holy matrimony?
For example, the Intel DG45FC Mini-ITX board ($99) (http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=10008327&prodlist=froogle) has 4 SATA ports...3 for Unraid (max for free license) and 1 for Bluray/DVD. This mobo with WD Green 2 TB HDD suggests that a fast HTPC box combining XBMC/Unraid could operate at 100 watts max load (including 3 hdd) and idle at 35 watts. (http://www.silentpcreview.com/article869-page5.html) That equals a seriously small (and quiet) potential 4 TB raid backup/media server/XBMC system for $300-400. Add in a more expensive mobo (+100 for PCI-E), a dedicated GPU (upcoming 40nm 40 watt) for light gaming, and you could still be running all of that off a 120 watt power brick. Yowza.
Would be nice to see a Live implementation of XBMC and Unraid...could potentially be a very nice system for HTPC users. To that end, there's some mention of neat things on BubbaRAID (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=15383615)
I don't fully understand what you're getting at.
If you're talking about running xbmc in a VM, you can put that idea aside for now. Besides the obvious playback issues, VMware workstation is the only vm software that i know of that allows for even SOME hardware accel. Seeing as xbmc relies heavily on OpenGL, that makes things tough. Seems to me KVM, Qemu, Vbox, etc would make more sense. It's very possible that they will implement accel in the future, but there's little as of yet (that i know of).
Also, seeing as this is an opensource project, and you've already spoken out about VDPAU as a proprietary headache, I don't see how you'd be ok with using VMWare or UNraid, both of which are free as in beer only.
It seems to me if you were looking for a major coding endeavor for powersavings and efficiency boosting, you'd look to port to other architectures... ARM for example.
http://beagleboard.org/.
I've got one up and running, it's 1.5 Watts under load, now THAT'S efficient.
TheUni
althekiller
2009-01-09, 06:25
You're trying to pound a nail with a screwdriver here. Why not just softraid the disks in linux and run xbmc on the same system? unraid is retarded anyway. Anyone who knows a thing or two about computer architecture instantly sees a huge bottleneck in their dedicated parity disk. Use the linux device mapper to setup a soft RAID5, that way your parity writes are done across all the disks in the array. Not to mention you aren't limited by their BS license, so you can add as many disks as you want. I'm pretty sure you can even do all of this in the ubuntu installer nowadays. Don't worry about the parity generation either, it's just a simple XOR in all but RAID6 (which you can do in linux if you so choose).
You might wanna do your research before buying that motherboard, there have been issues with it in linux, though I think these are down to no audio over hdmi.
Also, I've heard bad things about those WD green disks in raid arrays (both hard and soft). Their on-board power management tends to wreak havoc. Again, do your research.
Last, there's no way to do encrypted bluray in linux yet so you may wanna save the money for the time being and just grab a dvdrom.
I don't fully understand what you're getting at.
If you're talking about running xbmc in a VM, you can put that idea aside for now. Besides the obvious playback issues, VMware workstation is the only vm software that i know of that allows for even SOME hardware accel. Seeing as xbmc relies heavily on OpenGL, that makes things tough. Seems to me KVM, Qemu, Vbox, etc would make more sense. It's very possible that they will implement accel in the future, but there's little as of yet (that i know of).
Also, seeing as this is an opensource project, and you've already spoken out about VDPAU as a proprietary headache, I don't see how you'd be ok with using VMWare or UNraid, both of which are free as in beer only.
It seems to me if you were looking for a major coding endeavor for powersavings and efficiency boosting, you'd look to port to other architectures... ARM for example.
http://beagleboard.org/.
I've got one up and running, it's 1.5 Watts under load, now THAT'S efficient.
TheUni
I'm not looking for strictly minimum power draw but rather maximum experience for wattage consumed.
You make good points regarding VM, and I do not think that trying to run XBMC in a VM is worth the hassle - even more so when considering that GPGPU efforts would be even more complicated.
Given that there's no need for a display in Unraid or Twonky media server (web browser management), there's already been success putting them in a VM (the 256 MB comment points to the thread). The VM can run on Linux/Windows with XBMC installed. That approach is flexible and has few drawbacks - but it's not optimal.
Unraid code is released open source so there would be potential to bring the two ends together and tie a nice XBMC/Unraid knot. I feel these systems compliment each other and would make for a nice system for HTPC users.
You're trying to pound a nail with a screwdriver here. Why not just softraid the disks in linux and run xbmc on the same system?Use the linux device mapper to setup a soft RAID5, that way your parity writes are done across all the disks in the array.
Unraid certainly has advantages over softraid, namely that the disks not being accessed can spin down. Striping means all disks spin to serve just 1 file (such as a slow torrent download) so drives die faster (+ more heat/watts consumed). Furthermore, under Unraid loss of more than 1 drive does not kill the whole array...and then there's that delayed parity write to boost performance. All in all I'd say that's pretty smart rather than 'retarded'
Not to mention you aren't limited by their BS license, so you can add as many disks as you want.
Given that many enthusiasts are happy paying the $50 for a secure and mature system with dead simple setup I'd have to disagree with you. 'Course, someone could probably grab that source code and really make it dance with an HTPC frontend.
You might wanna do your research before buying that motherboard, there have been issues with it in linux, though I think these are down to no audio over hdmi.
Probably running windows. Thanks for the heads up though, was not aware of Linux issues. Guess that's why forums are valuable.
Also, I've heard bad things about those WD green disks in raid arrays (both hard and soft). Their on-board power management tends to wreak havoc. Again, do your research.
Havoc? Please post links. I have researched these drives and Unraid seems to play nice with them. If you're referring to them being slow (thus not for parity drive usage) then I'd say that they're plenty fast for media playback (GBE is the bottleneck). That being said, I'm actually looking forward to the new Samsung drives with 375 gigabit/in2 density.
Last, there's no way to do encrypted bluray in linux yet so you may wanna save the money for the time being and just grab a dvdrom.
$150 for a slim USB powered Bluray drive means less junk later and nice functionality now (on windows anyway).
It seems to me if you were looking for a major coding endeavor for powersavings and efficiency boosting, you'd look to port to other architectures... ARM for example.
http://beagleboard.org/.
I've got one up and running, it's 1.5 Watts under load, now THAT'S efficient.
TheUni
By the way, I do think that ARM would be a great port. In fact, I was reading about Qualcomm's Snapdragon technology (http://news.cnet.com/nanotech/?keyword=ATI)...
The new team was tasked to turbocharge typical ARM designs that were "maxing out" at about 500MHz, which isn't enough speed to deliver the experience that Qualcomm is aiming for. (Intel's Atom for Netbooks, by comparison, now maxes out at 1.6GHz.)
"There was a need to go do something beyond this. So, we went and got the architecture license (from ARM) and we have this team of about 50 CPU designers and we put them to task. So, four years and $350 (million) to $400 million later, we have a CPU that actually works better than the (typical) ARM CPU."
The piece de resistance of this strategy is the Qualcomm QSD8672 (http://www.qctconnect.com/products/snapdragon.html) dual-core Snapdragon that features two CPU computing cores capable of 1.5GHz performance, and a host of other features includes HSPA+, up to 28Mbps download speeds, 1080p high-definition video, Wi-Fi, mobile TV, and GPS. The graphics core is based on Advanced Micro Devices' ATI unit's technology.
Qualcomm is able to achieve this relatively high speed (1.5GHz) for a low-power processor because it did more than simply get a license from ARM. "We went and got an architecture license from ARM. The architecture license was for their new instruction set, the V7 instruction set. There's a difference between getting an architecture license and just getting a core license. A core license means ARM does the (chip) core and they give it to you. The architecture license is different: the actual implementation is your own," he said.
The 45-nanometer processor will be built by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
An ARM based core that targets 1080p...now that would be great. This probably ain't the one that's ideal, but yes, ARM is still viable.
Cross-platform is one of the reasons that I also support the idea of Open CL: companies are going to design their CPU/GPU devices to target Open CL performance. As such, Open CL code advantages will extend from the palmtop (Iphone (http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/12/20/future_iphones_to_wield_opencl_acceleration.html)) to the desktop.
As you know, even ARM supports Open CL (http://www.arm.com/iqonline/news/marketnews/23925.html).
Note to forum moderator: This tangent was not my fault!
It seems to me if you were looking for a major coding endeavor for powersavings and efficiency boosting, you'd look to port to other architectures... ARM for example.
http://beagleboard.org/.
I've got one up and running, it's 1.5 Watts under load, now THAT'S efficient.
TheUni
What exactly is running? Linux of some sort? That board is cool (1.5 watts won't burn the tongue)...
Are you serious about XBMC on ARM of some sort? I'm not at all impressed by a 30 watt idle by the way...glad you're not either.
I run unRAID and have for ages, it's far from retarded. All of the advantages cited are true and in my case 16 drives is hardly a limitation - especially when they can be ANY size I want mixed and matched. I currently have two of these servers, one IDE the other SATA. The SATA has drive sizes ranging from 1TB to 400gigs onboard for a total of 10 drives and a bit over 6.5TB of space. When I run out of space next I will simply buy a pair of 1.5TB drives and slap them in - one will be for parity though to replace the existing 1TB. Parity drive must always be equal to or greater than any other drive in the system. <shrug> BTW it uses a standard ReiserFS file system so if a pair of drives does go bad you have a decent shot of recovering the data and all of the other drives will be fine unlike most any other consumer RAID setup. Most of my drives spend their day powered down BTW unless I am serving torrents.
My ONE complaint about unRAID is the write speed. It has to R\W like 3x in order to perform a write and that does slow things. However my systems use them mostly for media and for backups and they stream multiple HD streams just fine. I will be installing a cache drive to try and speed writes tonight most likely since the DVD reprocessing I'm doing to move all of my VOB/IFO stuff to ISO is bottle necked by the write speed. <shrug> Oh and the way that shares are setup can take some getting used to as it's not exactly one giant storage drive you write to unless you use top level shares. I can explain further if anyone cares or head over to the fairly active Lime Technology board to ask - I'm over there somewhat often too.
As for piling XBMC on an unRAID box.... Well you would have to do a full Slack install following BubbaQ's tutorial and you'd have a fairly noisy box somewhere close to your AV center. Now maybe you can hide it behind a wall or in a closet but IMO this seems a bit complex and updating unRAID would become harder. The unRAID box WOULD have to be much more powerful but it wouldn't speed it's media serving performance any. An interesting science project but not one I am likely to do - all of my unRAID boxes are running slug slow Celeron CPUs with little memory booting from USB flash and have 10 or more drives with slow 12CM fans. Not bad in a backroom office like I am sitting in now but not something I want next to my coffee table either!
P.S. I AM considering doing the Slackware install though just to see what else I might be able to do with it but I won't be adding unRAID. I also think the price Tom is asking for hsi software and continued support is fair.
I run unRAID and have for ages, it's far from retarded. BTW it uses a standard ReiserFS file system so if a pair of drives does go bad you have a decent shot of recovering the data and all of the other drives will be fine unlike most any other consumer RAID setup. Most of my drives spend their day powered down BTW unless I am serving torrents.
From Open CL to unraid you do seem to pop up anywhere there's an interesting thread. I'm looking forward to hearing of your input.
As for piling XBMC on an unRAID box.... Well you would have to do a full Slack install following BubbaQ's tutorial and you'd have a fairly noisy box somewhere close to your AV center. Now maybe you can hide it behind a wall or in a closet but IMO this seems a bit complex and updating unRAID would become harder. The unRAID box WOULD have to be much more powerful but it wouldn't speed it's media serving performance any. An interesting science project but not one I am likely to do - all of my unRAID boxes are running slug slow Celeron CPUs with little memory booting from USB flash and have 10 or more drives with slow 12CM fans. Not bad in a backroom office like I am sitting in now but not something I want next to my coffee table either!
As to the slackware build with Unraid, I'm not so convinced that drive noise will be an issue if the new SATA drives are used with Unraid. Most of the SATA drives are 19-21 db...darn near inaudible especially considering that they spin up independently under Unraid.
Of course, I have a vested interest in all this. I'm currently working on an enclosure design that uses mini-itx with 4x sata and I expect that it will perform beautifully as a sofa-side HTPC/media server - with lotsa energy efficiency.
P.S. I AM considering doing the Slackware install though just to see what else I might be able to do with it but I won't be adding unRAID. I also think the price Tom is asking for hsi software and continued support is fair.
If you happen to include Unraid I do think that it would make for a worthy download. There's many out there that would take a shot at an XBMC/Unraid combo and thank you for the hassle of packaging it all...I'd donate myself for the cause of energy efficiency. Unraid's price is fair, XBMC's even fairer, and the two of them together is priceless.
althekiller
2009-01-10, 04:33
Keep in mind that 3*20db disks isn't 20db. You have to add the sound intensity so it's more like 25db and that increases logarithmically. This still isn't too bad. The problem comes at night. The frequency of the sound falls in the range of human speech, so you have to listen at a surprisingly high level to make out the words. Not to mention that unless you use DRC (which let's be honest, sounds like ass) there are going to be some damn loud explosions, music, other sound fx.
krypt2nite
2009-01-10, 04:54
I'm not interested in your idea of an all-in-one solution, but I had to chime in about how smart and worthy unRaid is. I've used every type of Raid implementation you can think of for along time and unRaid is pure genius for my consumer at home media server, and anyone trying to talk bad about it or say it's stupid needs to think twice. It works, and it works well. Raid is expensive and gives people that safe feeling, but it's like a placebo effect.
Oh yeah and I use 10 WD green 1TB drives...never had one problem or issue...
I'm not interested in your idea of an all-in-one solution, but I had to chime in about how smart and worthy unRaid is.
Points appreciated...good to hear reinforcement on the WD drives as well as general RAID experiences.
I'm not using unraid now (waiting for those new 1.5-2 TB drives) so I'd appreciate hearing more. Do you happen to think the VM approach is viable? My current plan is to build a slackware 12.2 w/ Unraid and host that with VM Player on XP (for gaming/ ). The plan is to distribute the Unraid on Windows system as a VMWare appliance, but I'm anticipating network and SATA configuration issues that will make mobo specific appliances a necessity. Your take?
I do like the idea of XBMC and Unraid/Rtorrent on Slackware as well. So long as Windows isn't needed for specific apps, it is a better approach. As to popular demand, it seems like there's a lot of people who want to unify machines. Now who will have the glory of building it?
I think you misunderstand - I'm not looking to package up unRAID. I am considering building it on Slackware following Bubba's tutorial just so that I can have a more comprehensive unRAID box that can take over some other light duties and to learn about what else I might do. As for building unRAID as a VM appliance I think you'll find that the license precludes this unless you want to do a great deal of work. I do not think you'll find much support for that among the folks that support Tom either - including myself. I would also be VERY hesitant to take something solid but mission critical like unRAID and host it on a Windows OS. I mean, my unRAID stays up for months at a time but saying the same for my old XP boxes would be quite a stretch. While you might save some power I think you might also find yourself losing data during the inevitable crashes. I think BubbaQ has run it in a VM though, he can speak better to this.
As for noise, my drives are fairly quiet - I do run some of the WD greens BTW. However it's really the cooling fans that make or break things. My IDE machine is nearly dead silent with about 5-6 12CM fans in it, the other machine uses SATA drive trays and the 80MM fans on it make it WAY noisier I think. Wanting to reduce power consumption is noble and all but in this case I think KISS as in Keep It Simple Stupid is the way to go. Build a decent unRAID, there are builds starting at $200 in the forum, and then build a good XBMC box to compliment it. <shrug>
Havoc? Please post links. I have researched these drives and Unraid seems to play nice with them. If you're referring to them being slow (thus not for parity drive usage) then I'd say that they're plenty fast for media playback (GBE is the bottleneck). That being said, I'm actually looking forward to the new Samsung drives with 375 gigabit/in2 density.
Havoc... I am guessing he was referring to normal RAID arrays... In normal RAID if the drives have odd power management they could mess with the array since all drives must essentially work as "one", if one were to slow down/suspend, the array could go offline temporarily causing issues.
With Unraid this really isn't an issue because it essentially is a JBOD system that happens to make parity data sort of like par files for the data on all the drives. Since the drives store and operate independently it can easily handle the greater variance of the wd green drives (along with any mix of size and manufacture)