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

[chlowden]

I spoke to  autodesk flame tech about Thunderbolt. He told me that the thunderbolt linux driver was a very "young" driver and should be used with caution in particular with the autodesk CENTOS 7.2. He did not consider it to be a production level solution. That said, he was very curious to see how things moved forward.

We have been warned.

[slabrie]

As I wrote earlier, the Thunderbold Linux support is a CentOS feature and not something we code or even qualify.  This is why I call this a science project since you might find good or bad things that we sadly cannot help with.  But I am sure Intel (who provides the kernel driver) who like to know if you find any issues.  Me too, btw and probably Joel 😉

Who is Flame Tech?

[blakehuber]

can you go into a little more detail about how you got your thunderbolt drive to work? i'm trying to do the same with a promise pegasus and keep hitting road blocks. literally any info you provide will be better than nothing. thank you!

[joelosis]

Im using the ASUS thunderbolt 3 pcie card, and i just enabled legacy in my bios thunderbolt settings, then when it came time to mount i typed in
mount -t hfsplus -o force -o rw /dev/wherever/its/showing /media
This was also using a thunderbolt 3 to 2 adaptor and using a lacie drive, maybe the Pegasus has some stuff going on behind the scenes?
What kind of road blocks r u running into?

[chlowden]

Hello
I have not been able to mount the hfs plus volumes neither on this thunderbolt nor on our official flame 2018 z840 machine. In the end I formatted the promise in ext4 and for the moment I have had no problems. But I see no difference in the new hfs+ driver as I cannot write to it. The disk utility recognises the hfs plus volumes but they won't mount.


Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

[slabrie]

I guess you have installed the DKU that comes with 2018 release, right?  Are you able to mount an HFS+ usb drive on the workstation? 

[blakehuber]

ok i think i'm ready to use your mount  - t commands, but before i do that and to help ensure i don't screw up like i have a bunch of times already....

what commands did you use for the hfs+ drive to set the mount point?  i have seen so many different ways now - that i would love to just follow yours since it worked for you.  so if you don't mind backing up to the part where you first had the drive show up in "disks" and go from there i would be so incredibly grateful.

[blakehuber]

i figured out how to set the mount point and entered your commands. will see what happens next....

thanks,

blake

[christopher.lowden]

I have just plugged in an hfs+ disk on a usb port on our Z840 FLAME 2018 on centos 7.2 that was installed by an autodesk validated tech and the disk mounts fine but I cannot write to it.

I have the same problem on a similar config FLAME ASSIST.

[blakehuber]

seems like everything is mounted and the pegasus thunderbolt shows up in my media storage in flame setup - however when i start flame it says “no volumes configured / mounted on host”

i feel like i’m so close! what am i missing?

thanks,
blake

[slabrie]

Very good!

You need to make sure you can write to the storage and then use Flame Setup to configure the media storage.  This is not related to Thunderbolt but standard to any mounted drive.

Refer to Flame's User Manual for more details.

Let us know.

[joelosis]

Id first test that u have read write aceess by copying a file to it.
To be clear u r setting this up as a new framestore then? If yes, try adding it as a framestore logged in as root and doing the flame setup app there

[christopher.lowden]

I am already in root and all my tests are done as root. Even in root I have an Access denied error.

[chlowden]

As for working with a Promise Pegasus in thunderbolt, my tests have been good as long as the Promise is working a bootup. Hot plugin does not work neither does daisy chaining other devices. The promise works well 1080 media uncompressed. It does not play smoothly for me on 3K uncompressed media. I would have been surprised.

[blakehuber]

when i went to reboot the system after i set the mount point to the pegasus and followed joel's commands - the system wouldn't boot up. it hangs as i think it's trying to mount the pegasus drive? i don't know a way around that. i'll have to tinker to see what throws it off, but if you have any tips on the auto mounting of the drive, i'm all ears.  i'll try a few things later and report back. thanks for all the tips from everyone.

[blakehuber]

This might be my final post before I throw this computer into the wall...Here is what's happened.

I can confirm that i eventually got the promise pegasus via thunderbolt to mount with read/write access and i was able to use it as a framestore.  However, upon rebooting i ran into nothing but problems and it would just hang. Having had something similar before i knew what to do.  I ssh'ed in and reverted to an older xorg.conf file which allowed me boot up. i figured that like before, i could just re copy the wacom tablet settings into the xorg.conf and save and all would be good. nope.for whatever reason after editing the xorg.conf and rebooted i continually get into a hanging state.  I'm not sure how the promise plays into this (maybe b/c its also an input device?) but i can't seem to have both working while rebooting.  Also, even using joels script i seem to have lost r/w status when i did get the system up and had to re enter the commands. maybe that had something to do with xorg though? this is all out of my expertise so i'm just left with i'm so close feeling, but it's not satisfying.  i'm not sure why the xorg.conf and booting up would be affected by the drive.  My earlier problems from rebooting with the drive were b/c i needed to add "nofail" to the fstab.  maybe i need to edit that again with new commands?

[chlowden007]

I have no idea about xorg apart from Flame uses it for different monitor configs but the link below describes in a few lines that it also can affect other attached machine ... maybe thunderbolt cards or drives

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xorg.conf