2008 Mac Pro

[TJ Zimmerman]

Hello, I have a 2008 Mac Pro populated with 6 4TB disks. I can boot the Proxmox installer from both USB flashdrive and USB CD Drive.

I cannot access the installer unless I pass the acpi=false flag to Grub. After that, the installer starts fine.

During installation, I configure the installation location to be a ZFS RAID10 pool created from my 6 disks. After installation succeeds, I reboot the computer, remove the USB device, and let the Mac Pro boot.

After about a minute it times out because it cannot find the boot device and simply flashes a folder with a question mark on it. At first I thought this was possibly occurring during the installation of GRUB due to my flash drive throwing off the _sd#_ order. However, after burning a CD, the issue still persists.

Holding down Option doesn't show any available boot disks. Like it normally would if a USB Flashdrive were inserted, for example.

There is at least 1 other instance of a person installing Proxmox on a 2008 Mac Pro. But he did so on a single drive. I cannot link to this thread due to user restrictions, but a google search of "proxmox 2008 mac pro" will yield the relevant result.

Any idea what could be happening here?

EDIT: Sorry for the lousy title. I meant to put that there as a placeholder and come back to it and forgot. And it doesn't appear that I'm able to edit it.

 

[LnxBil]

But he did so on a single drive.

Yes. You need UEFI and redundant ZFS and that is currently not possible with the installer. There are underlying synchronization problems (not strictly PVE related) of then redundant UEFI disk that prohibit this from doing. There are workarounds, but all require to go very deep and are neither not error prone nor update-friendly.

Best would be to use either a single drive for the PVE install or a RAID of all disks to install to. Unfortunately UEFI and (redundandent) ZFS are not possible at the moment.

 

[juju01]

Yes. You need UEFI and redundant ZFS and that is currently not possible with the installer. There are underlying synchronization problems (not strictly PVE related) of then redundant UEFI disk that prohibit this from doing. There are workarounds, but all require to go very deep and are neither not error prone nor update-friendly.

Best would be to use either a single drive for the PVE install or a RAID of all disks to install to. Unfortunately UEFI and (redundandent) ZFS are not possible at the moment.

@LnxBil, What is the current situation with this? I also have a 2008 MacPro I'd like to use as a proxmox server. I want to wipe all the disks clean and just install proxmox 7 - no macos. UEFI and redundant ZFS is available now, right? So it worth the effort? What do I need to look out for?

 

[Dunuin]

Yes, UEFI can now boot from ZFS. Best you just try it and if some errors occur post them here.

 

[LnxBil]

Yes, UEFI can now boot from ZFS. Best you just try it and if some errors occur post them here.

That was never the problem, but having the UEFI partition sync service that replicates the UEFI/ESP over different disks ... and yes this is now part of PVE and is called proxmox-boot-tool.