Thunderbolt and Centos 7

[chlowden]

Hello

With the migration of the flame family to Centos 7, I am very interested find out if Centos 7 has Thunderbolt 2 drivers.I would like to build a flame assist system with Centos on a HP Z640 which has an HP Thunderbolt 2 PCIe card driving a Pergasus Thunderbolt Raid. Currently, the above machine config works great in Windows.

I want to move away from mac and this could be the solution.

Many thanks for any thoughts

[sorb78]

Hi, I don't think it will work. I base this only on fuzzy Google research though 🙂

[chlowden]

I found this in google that gave me hope ...
https://www.centos.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=50753
https://www.centos.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=57927

[chlowden]

Hello

I am relaunching this question with the confirmation of centos deployment.

Does anyone think that Autodesk can integrate in their deployment a thunderbolt dirver in particular for the Pegasus raids?

Thank you

[slabrie]

Hello Christopher!

You request makes perfect sense since using a fast storage connection is the way to go.  To be able to get where you'd like t go, it would requires us the following work:

-update the CentOS distribution with the Thunderbolt driver

-update the CentOS distribution with the HFS+ driver

-validate the HP Thunderbolt card option

-validate file system performance with our products.

Some pieces of this nice puzzle are sadly not quite there yet...  One thing you could do is to use a USB 3.0 disk array with a non HFS+ file system and you'd get what you are looking for.  But for no, it is hard for us to predict when your request would be available since we have to rely on third party parts to make this happen.

[chlowden]

Stephane

Thank you very much for picking up this one.

In my Centos 7 limited tests on a macpro, the centos hfs+ driver works well. But I was more for reformatting the Promise to linux. (Not great as there is no linux Promise control app.)

But the real challenge is integrating the thunderbolt driver in the linux system. The new macs have only thunderbolt and lots of PCs are moving towards thunderbolt, so at some point, the driver will have to be generalised. I presume that this is more a Centos dev but I am sure that Autodesk has a real interest in actively encouraging this.

I hope that Autodesk finds this project of interest and if you are looking for a beta tester, you can count on me

[slabrie]

Thanks Christopher for the investigation!  Not many people install CentOS on a Mac!  I guess you used a legacy Mac Pro without Thunderbolt ports, right?

As you said, Thunderbold support is more a CentOS thing than Autodesk but we'll do some research on the this.

Stay tuned!

[chlowden]

You must be clairvoyant. For the centos 7 on mac, it was on my favourite macpro with internally formatted HFS+. As for thunderbolt, my interest is on either an HP Z640 or HP Z440. I have a thunderbolt 2 card on a HP Z640 that sees the Promise great under windows. Centos 7 works well on the HP Z640 but I need a thunderbolt driver to really start testing. I have read that a driver can be injected into Centos, but I don't have the programming level for that. It seems that other Linux OSs have already got some Thunderbolt functionality and I read that Intel has the intention of releasing kernel driver.

After nearly 30 years of mac, I no longer have confidence in the apple's pro strategy and the new centos looks good and runs super fast.

[slabrie]

Me again 😉

So, as you have probably read on many web sites, we just released the 2018 version of Flame Family and there is support for HFS+ file systems on the updated DKU.  So, just install DKU, Flame 2018 and you will be able to read/write to your HFS+ storage.

We did not try yet testing an HFS+ drive connected through Thunderbolt yet so who knows, you might be the first one to try! 

Let us know.

[joelosis]

I bought a thunderbolt 3 card when i built my custom linux system just in case this moment ever came up, will test and let u know the results

[slabrie]

Thanks Joel! Looking forward reading your test results!

[chlowden]

Thank You for this very good news. I will build a system on our z640 early next week and see how we get on.

Sent from my iPhone

[chlowden]

I suppose it is a little obvious, but Centos 7.2 autodesk version does not instantly mount my Thunderbolt 2 hard drive.

The HP solution is a PCIe card

http://h20565.www2.hp.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c04293195-1

Hp offer a BIOS version for some Linux distributions, Redhat included that mention Thunderbolt bug fixes

http://h20565.www2.hp.com/hpsc/swd/public/detail?swItemId=wk_172246_1&sp4ts.oid=6978835#tab-history

I will try this BIOS ...

[slabrie]

We are currently on BIOS 2.29 on the Z840 and the Thunderbolt fixes you talked about came in 2.23 so we should be good to go.

You might need to enable the Enable Automatic Mounting of Removable Media (in System Settings/Removable Devices.

If you have installed the DKU for Flame Family 2018 with HFS+ support, you should be fine but like I wrote, this is not something we have played with up to now.

Very curious to see what you'll find.  Keep us updated!

[chlowden]

I can confirm that the upgraded HP Z640 BIOS 02.31 Rev.A 9 Jan 2017 and activating the Thunderbolt and putting it into legacy mode in the BIOS settings made the Promise Pegagus mount.

Added NTFS-3G to the CENTOS 7.2 and the volume mounted with read / write. Reformatted the Promise in HFSplus and added the  elrepo.org library but sadly have a read-only volume.

I am waiting to have access to the 2018 software so I presume that the installer will have a better HFS plus library.  So this config is starting to look viable. :))

Abit off topic: I presume that the Flame software includes the necessary ATTO drivers for a HBA card.  The centos 7 does not want to install them when I download them off the ATTO website.

[slabrie]

That was fast 😉

Very good!

Get the 2018 release and the DKU and let us know. 

Since you can read media from the drive I'd be curious what data rate you get in our products.

Thanks for spending time on this science project 😉

[joelosis]

my test for thunderbolt 3 was cut short since my asus thunderbolt 3 card is type c thunderbolt only and i have a thunderbolt 2 drive but need to get a old thunderbolt 2 to 3 type c converter , my head hurts, these tests r looking promising though, exciting times 🙂

[joelosis]

i can confirm on my custom linux box using an asus thunderbolt 3 card thunderbolt is working on linux using hfs plus read/write is working after running this command

mount -t hfsplus -o force -o rw /dev/sdi2 /mnt/raidfive/

then this

chmod -R 777 /mnt/raidfive/

i connected a Lacie 8tb raid 0 thunderbolt , which is a previous gen 2 thunderbolt connector, so i bought a gen 2 to gen 3 type c and its working 🙂

attached is a disks read/write test which is pretty much exactly what u would expect for a raid zero using spinning disks

[christopher.lowden]

After spending so much time getting the OS installed, I can confirm that I can mount on a HP Z640 a Promise RAID in Thunderbolt via the HP Thunderbolt card. After using the Autodesk DKU with HFSplus driver I have read- only on the volume in HFSplus. Using the NTFS_G3 driver, I have read write / read access in NTFS.

I formatted the PROMISE RAID to ext4 (it took me afew repeated tries to get the drive formated properly ) and now I have read : write access. A terminal test claims that the RAID is deliveruing read / write as 1GBs per second. This needs to be confirmed.

I will have to see if this is a production stable solution ... but it looks very encouraging.

[slabrie]

Very nice!

I guess you could have follow Joel recommendation to get Read&Write with HFS+ with the Pegasus drive.  But if your are fine formatting the drive that is good too. 

I have seen on B&H a ThunderBolt 3.0 card from ASUS at 67,87U$!  This is very a very cheap upgrade to get fast connectivity. 

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1267068-REG/asus_thunderboltex_3_expansion_card.html

Have fun and report success.