I wanted to share an update that I added a virtualized NAS within proxmox on the Mac Pro. I didn't have good luck with "pass-through" using any of the drive controllers I had available--multiple Marvel-based controllers worked initially but later failed under load. I also didn't want to use the Mac's onboard controller as it is limited to SATA2 speeds. After doing my research, I landed on an LSI 9211-8i flashed to "IT mode" (hw raid disabled). This set me back a whopping $38 shipped, including cabling for 8 drives, and plenty are available on ebay at this price. It's been solid long enough now that I've begun prepping my Synology for resell.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
MP 1,1-5,1 Do any of you run Proxmox on your Mac Pro 5,1?
- Thread starter Project Alice
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
So you have this installed and a passing thru to proxmox for extra storage or whatever?
Hi all, I wanted to revive this thread because lately I've been testing installing the current Proxmox 8.2-1 on a Mac Pro 5,1 (flashed from 4,1). The installation was apparently successful, it was a single-disk ext4 install for testing purposes. However, Proxmox failed to boot, as the initramdisk will not find the root fs, and gets stuck with a kernel panic. It says "list of devices available" and strangely, this list is empty. More strangely, at the grub2 prompt, I am able to ls the LV and I see the device (lvm/pve-root), so I don't understand why initramdisk will not find it. I have tried the "rootdelay" parameter with up to 30 secs, also booted a live distro and chrooted into the Proxmox installation, recreated the ramdisk with update-initramfs and update-grub2. None of these worked, I still get the same error. Has anyone had this problem, or has any tips what to do?
Never tried Prox on the 5,1 (or any other Mac, for that matter); mainly because of the inherently excessive power expenditure. Same holds-true for my Dell dual-Xeon T5500
I sourced a 12th-Gen AlderLake system from CWWK that consumes ~15w
3TB of PCIe-x4 m.2 storage, SATA 6.0, 48GB DDR5, and four 2.5g LAN
The 8 efficiency cores in the AlderLake are more performant than the dual X5675's that are in the Dell/dual x5677's in the 5,1
The CWWK + networking + a DS920 operate within a 50w envelope, <=20% of just the 5,1
Not that I don't enjoy Full-Phat Computing; but, well . . . I'm not trying to run Midjourney in a virt
I sourced a 12th-Gen AlderLake system from CWWK that consumes ~15w
3TB of PCIe-x4 m.2 storage, SATA 6.0, 48GB DDR5, and four 2.5g LAN
The 8 efficiency cores in the AlderLake are more performant than the dual X5675's that are in the Dell/dual x5677's in the 5,1
The CWWK + networking + a DS920 operate within a 50w envelope, <=20% of just the 5,1
Not that I don't enjoy Full-Phat Computing; but, well . . . I'm not trying to run Midjourney in a virt
How was it installed? I had it installed on EFI, not CSM. It was working fine for me. If I remember correctly I was using a USB HDD as the boot device for proxmox (I didn't have any internal disks available as the purpose was an NAS).
I am not using ZFS, I chose the "ext4" option as I mentioned, which automatically created an LVM volume group and LVs inside that. The installation was onto a dedicated internal disk for testing purposes. The boot was from a USB stick with the YUMI boot manager, and I believe it was an EFI boot (can the mac pro do anything else?).
The Mac Pro can do CSM or “bios mode” for Windows. This is how Windows XP runs on these Macs, and is usually how people end up installing other operating systems on these things outside Mac OS. This is because on Macs under 2012 the EFI was not quite up to the same standard as uEFI is on PC’s. The 5,1 Mac Pro is pretty decent these days with EFI on the latest firmware, and the use of opencore. Prior to opencore, CSM was the preferred way of getting things working on these things.
That said, I had my installation of proxmox with EFI, and no opencore on the latest firmware.
I’m not sure what YUMI is.