Atomic Pi Installation

[joncolby]

I am trying to install Proxmox 6.1 on atomic pi and it does not recognize the eMMC hdd on the pi.. is there any specific steps i need to take to install proxmox on an atomic pi ?


what happens currently when i try installing from usb thumb drive is that it sees the drive but cannot install to it (proxmox unable to get device for partition 1) and then it leaves the drive without the necissary information for it to show up in the uefi bios.. the only way i have found to correct this is to install windows 10 as the windows10 installer somehow can see and re-initialize the drive and then it shows back up in the atomic pi bios.

 

[wolfgang]

Hi,

As we do recommend to install Proxmox VE only on Disk with high endurance.
eMMC devices are not supported by the installer.

Proxmox VE will write for login about 10GB per day witch will destroy the most eMMC devices in a short time.
But you can install Proxmox VE on top of Debian [1] to come through this limitation.
But I really would recommend installing Proxmox VE on HDD or SSD.

1.) https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_Buster

 

[joncolby]

Is there any way to turn down the logging that proxmox does ? The VM I am going to host is only 600MB so for proxmox to write 10G a day in log data, well that makes proxmox look retarded and like it has been poorly made..

 

[joncolby]

.. and more importantly, how do I force it to install to my eMMC without a Debian install first ?

 

[wolfgang]

Proxmox VE does not poorly make.
It is an enterprise-class Virtualisation.
In enterprise environments, you like to has logs and stats.

 

[joncolby]

Look, I am not trying to be bossy or demanding or disrespectful, I just need to be able to make my own decisions as tp what hard drive I can install to or where my log files are stored.... I just simply need the technical information on how to force a standard proxmox install on my hardware without having to install Debian Linux first. May I please get the support I am seeking without being limited by someone elses views on best practices.

Thank You.
-Jonathan

 

[BobhWasatch]

He said it wasn't possible and that you had to install over Debian if you want to do that. Installing over Debian _is_ supported, so you're not going off into la-la land here.

 

[joncolby]

Even when my family brought me to church as a kid, I read and respected the people’s view who held the signs ‘ keep your church out of my bedroom’... they wanted free choice.. it seems funny to be on the other side now as an adult trying to use open software and being told it has some sort of anti-eMMC policy baked into it from its open source creators...... it seems counter to the very principal that drives this kind of software.. thanks for the clarity Wolfgang and bobwasatch.

 

[fireon]

Use the Debianinstaller, and it will work easily.

 

[t.lamprecht]

If there's still interest in this I'd try to take a look, cannot promise anything bug I got the installer to work with a few cases which did not before, so the chance is at least not zero

First you'd need to boot into debug mode of the installer, then get to the second shell (the first is only the initram and has only busybox and thus not the full system environment we have in the installer). Here get me at least the output of lsblk

 

[joncolby]

Ok... I’m interested in how you got this to work and with what version...

 

[joncolby]

I’ll get you the output and paste it

 

[micma]

I tried it on an odroid h2 with 128MB emmc, 1TB NVME and 2*4TB HDD. Here is the output.

I'd love to be able to use the emmc at least for storing the templates, or maybe some backup of configs.

 

[t.lamprecht]

So, mmcblkX it is, thanks! I think that this needs some more specific handling though, as the boot0 and boot1 partition are read only by default and need to be specific enabled to allow writing out our grub bootloader - as I'm not sure if the system can boot from other partitions directly..

Can you open an enhancement request at https://bugzilla.proxmox.com/ (refer to this thread), as it's probably not just a simple one liner fix and as this is not the highest priority it could need a bit of time..
I'd propose to use the NVMe as root device in the meantime - it can then still be used for VMs.

 

[micma]

That’s what I do. It’s just frustrating I can’t even use the emmc at all. It’s not visible in the gui.

 

[t.lamprecht]

Use the commandline to format it as normal ext4 or XFS, add it to /etc/fstab and add it as directory storage if you just want to use it for VM, Backup, ISO/CT templates if you want to just use it somehow..

 

[Cryolithic]

Came here via search wanting to check if anyone has had success installing on the A-Pi. I'm a bit surprised at the offense taken by a clear and rational response to uninformed requests.

"How do I install to emmc?"

"We don't support that, as it would destroy the device quickly. If you really want to do that though, you can do it this way..." (And it will kill it, very quickly in fact. Benchmarking took it down by 35% lifetime https://dlidirect.com/community/cha...pics/4980-emmc-and-root-filesystem-benchmarks)

"Can I make it kill it slower? But really, how can I just do it anyway?"

"We don't have an option to do that, this software was designed for enterprise use, we have to put our limited resources to making it the best product as possible there."

"I'm not disrespectful but....I'm totally going to be disrespectful"

"He explained it can't be done that way, but you can do it this other way that's still an official way to do it"

"Weird story bringing religion into a technical discussion to try and frame rational development choices as something anti choice free softwares, while ignoring the fact that open source software means you can grab the source and do whatever dumb thing you want to with it. Also ignoring that it does NOT mean that the person who develops and maintains the project must change the product to fit whatever harebrained idea you have."


I can just see the post from you in a few months..."Proxmox killed my hardware!!111"

It's really rather simple to drop to a terminal during the installer, and partition and mount the emmc in place of whatever you told the installer to install to, however, it's going to kill the emmc.

If you install it to something more durable on the USB3 port, you can drop to shell after install and mount the emmc somewhere handy for iso storage.

 

[joncolby]

Well, to the credit of your own strange and disrespectful ‘fakely-framed’ rant, I Actually was able to modify things to get it to work (way more complicated than imagined) and modified proxmox and operating system so it did a lot less read write operations and it did work, but later ended up changing to a multi core server system instead of a pi cluster... once we gave it a haircut & changed the FS attributes it ran on the eMMC fine and did not ‘kill it by 35%’.... I think a performance tuning should be included in these situations and comparisons going forward.

 

[Cryolithic]

Yes, it is way more complicated than you imagined. Funny that, yet you expected the devs to just jump at your whim to do it.

If you reduced the writes to the emmc, then yes, not reducing the lifespan significantly would be the expected outcome, no surprise there. That doesn't change the fact that the emmc is not particularly durable, and sustained writes will significantly reduce the lifespan of the silicon.

You think a performance tuning should be included in what situations? In ones where the software is run completely out of spec of it's design?

"Hey Bob! Why is it my rear differential keeps blowing since I dropped this supercharged engine in my car?"

The mind simply boggles at the lack of self awareness. I'm usually quite polite on forums like these, principle of charity as a guide to interactions, but the sheer audacity to virtually walk in and start making demands to use the software in an unsupported manner on what is essentially a toy computer...

 

[joncolby]

Ok, well thank you for sharing your views of self awareness. Sorry my audacious request to the forum has ruffled your feathers so bad you had to put all this effort in, don’t let your clam bake too long or it will get all hot and steamy.