GPU passthrough to jail?

[jlentz3]

Is it possible to pass a gpu through to a jail running Windows? I’d like to play with mining a bit but not wanting to invest in more than a gpu card if I can get away with it.

I figure I’ve already got a 24/7 server running on almost zero available resources, might as well try to get some alt mining done as well.

 

[joeschmuck]

I don't know how to pass through the gpu but thought I'd offer this up... From a purely money making perspective, mining bitcoins using something other than an ASIC will not earn money. A GPU will burn more money in electricity than what you will earn. But I do think it's a good way to cut your teeth and get into mining to see if it's something you really want to do. I recall when bitcoin mining came out, I tried it out and mined a little, then after a while I just deleted everything, didn't think it was going anywhere but I guess I was wrong. Stupid me.

 

[jlentz3]

I don't know how to pass through the gpu but thought I'd offer this up... From a purely money making perspective, mining bitcoins using something other than an ASIC will not earn money. A GPU will burn more money in electricity than what you will earn. But I do think it's a good way to cut your teeth and get into mining to see if it's something you really want to do. I recall when bitcoin mining came out, I tried it out and mined a little, then after a while I just deleted everything, didn't think it was going anywhere but I guess I was wrong. Stupid me.

Not BTC.
alts.

I’m aware of the difficulty.


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[jlentz3]

Hey Joe, Just logged in on laptop and saw your Sig. I thought ESXI was naughty... Not to be put into production.

Is it solid now to run ESXI on the proper hardware with FreeNAS 11.1? That would solve my problem. (And allow me to do a few other things I'd like to do.)

 

[joeschmuck]

There is nothing wrong with running FreeNAS on ESXi but the bad part of it is when you don't shutdown the VMs in the correct order, then all kinds of chaos can occur. FreeNAS actually has ESXi support built in.

The only thing I run on FreeNAS is Plex, I run any other VM in ESXi. ESXi is very mature and works very well. Will it solve your issue, it could make it easier for you to run an OS you prefer and then your applications in the VM. I am considering migrating my Plex jail to an Ubuntu platform. I already run Ubuntu full time in a VM so there is no additional overhead.

The main difficulty in running ESXi and FreeNAS on top of that is passing through the hard drive HBA. True that you could pass the drives through via RDM but from what I've heard, there could be some risk there and I'm not an ESXi expert. But I will say that I am now running RDM on my primary FreeNAS machine, I'm in the prosess of upgrading my hard drives to four 6TB drives and pulling the 5 year old WD Reds out. It's taking me a long time to get this done, I've been procrastinating a lot.

A little more on RDM... I tested my new 6TB drives for almost a solid week and then created a RAIDZ2 pool in my main FreeNAS box, along with my WD RED drives. I had to boot from a USB FreeBAS stick and not use ESXi because I didn't have enough HBA ports to pass through. So in this new pool I copied ~50% of my data, none of my computer backups were copied which was the bulk of my data. I shutdown the machine and pulled the new 6TB drives out. I rebooted ESXi and all came up normal. The new 6TB drives sat in the corner for about 2 weeks, I just didn't feel like foolign with them. Then comes yesterday and I felt like starting on the changes. I decided to try out RDM. RDM using just free ESXi is somewhat complicated, you need to setup the vmdk shares manually via CLI. It's not too difficult but it's a pain that you can't do it via the GUI. Anyway I searched the internet for help on RDM and found it, read it, made my own changes, and all seems to be working. The good part is the pool imported without issue.

Well you should give VMWare Workstation Player a test drive and it will give you a feel for ESXi.

 

[nightshade00013]

I don't know if pass through will work on FreeNAS as it would on FreeBSD. My guess is that due to FreeNAS being setup the way it is you would have to modify things that are not meant to be modified and redo the modifications on every update. https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve/pci_passthru

With that said the alt coins can be very profitable (I started with a single GTX1080 in mid July a second was purchased at the end of september with crypto and have a 3rd purchased with crypto that will be here tomorrow) but I don't think I would combine my FreeNAS with a crypto miner for a couple reasons, the biggest one is the huge power requirement and possibility of causing stability problems with the FreeNAS. I would imagine that it very possibly even cause data loss since you are likely causing noise . Just get a https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/B250-MINING-EXPERT/ and a cheap celeron or pentium with a stick of ram and mine on. Hopefully the one I am supposed to get as a christmas gift will get here soon.

 

[jlentz3]

I would imagine that it very possibly even cause data loss since you are likely causing noise . Just get a https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/B250-MINING-EXPERT/ and a cheap celeron or pentium with a stick of ram and mine on. Hopefully the one I am supposed to get as a christmas gift will get here soon.

Thanks!
One thing I was thinking about was PSU issues, Thanks for the MOBO recommendation, I'll look into that. That's insane, People actually run 16 GPUS?!?

 

[jlentz3]

LOL, That MOBO isn't going to be in stock anytime soon...

 

[nightshade00013]

Nope it's hard to find. My father and I were talking and he came across a place that had them in stock for 180 or so and got like 50 off basically paying less than MSRP. They were out of stock pretty quickly but I was contacted and they are supposed to have them in stock near the end of the month so mine should show up soon after.

And that board supports 19 direct connections one of which is a x16 slot though I don't know if it can be split into multiple channels or not. Even with 12 gpu's I will be a very happy person.

 

[danb35]

Are GPUs still a viable way to mine? I'd thought ASICs were needed for profitable mining on pretty much any cryptocurrency.

 

[nightshade00013]

Yep, not for bitcoins but there are other algorithms that are not ASIC capable. I mine Zcash which is an equihash based coin. With two GTX 1080's and my desktop's rx480 mining part time I pull in about 0.7 ZEC per month which is about 350 per month. I sold off 1.65 a couple months ago for .16 something btc (665 US) and only had one GTX 1080 at that point and got a second one shipped out. I sold 1.6 a few days ago for .043 BTC (about 700 US) and ordered another GTX 1080. My electric rate is around .10 per KWH and a month with two 1080's and a rx480 is about 30.00 so I turned about 35 worth of electricity into 700 cash. The bad thing is the place I am at is going to be a pain when I have to power 3 1200 watt PSU's but hopefully it won't take me too awful long to move after I have that going.

 

[Kennyvb8]

Would Love gpu passthrough. But for plex transcode!


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[joeschmuck]

Yep, not for bitcoins but there are other algorithms that are not ASIC capable. I mine Zcash which is an equihash based coin. With two GTX 1080's and my desktop's rx480 mining part time I pull in about 0.7 ZEC per month which is about 350 per month. I sold off 1.65 a couple months ago for .16 something btc (665 US) and only had one GTX 1080 at that point and got a second one shipped out. I sold 1.6 a few days ago for .043 BTC (about 700 US) and ordered another GTX 1080. My electric rate is around .10 per KWH and a month with two 1080's and a rx480 is about 30.00 so I turned about 35 worth of electricity into 700 cash. The bad thing is the place I am at is going to be a pain when I have to power 3 1200 watt PSU's but hopefully it won't take me too awful long to move after I have that going.

Very informative. I read up a littel bit about this topic and it appears that GPUs are becoming the new thing over ASIC's. I love the fact that you are able to make some good money in doing this.

 

[nightshade00013]

Yeah, I am enjoying it and since my place is all electric I look at it as I get paid to heat my apartment. It's hard to beat free money. I have dabbled a little bit here and there over the years but when bitcoin was worth around 100 per or less it was still hard to get into without an ASIC and trust me I tried. I have messed with a few here and there during the winter and never made anything but again there was no real downside as I was heating up the house with electricity. I got the RX480 in January and was able to make money even if only a little bit and knew I needed to build out a miner so I bought a board with what I made along with two sticks of DDR4 and bought a cpu with cash later picking up my first GTX 1080 since 1070's were nearly the same cost and very scarce.

 

[diedrichg]

I don't know how to pass through the gpu but thought I'd offer this up... From a purely money making perspective, mining bitcoins using something other than an ASIC will not earn money.

This article will give you all the info you need to know. In the last 3/4 of the article is a table outlining the cost of the GPU, its mining capability and its break-even day.

http://www.pcgamer.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-cryptocurrency-mining/

Spoiler:
Least # days: 129
Most # days: 215

 

[nightshade00013]

This article will give you all the info you need to know. In the last 3/4 of the article is a table outlining the cost of the GPU, its mining capability and its break-even day.

http://www.pcgamer.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-cryptocurrency-mining/

Spoiler:
Least # days: 129
Most # days: 215

I use https://whattomine.com/ I can select any number of configs and it is based on the spot price at the time. The price can go up or down but gives you a guess on when you can pay off a part. It also allows you to figure your electric costs based on the cards used. I do recommend you however put in a pool fee of 3% to 4%. Most pools are around 1% to 2% and the software to mine generally throws in a 1 to 2% fee as well. And do remember that you will pay fees to exchange as well as transfer out currency, in the crypto market there is no free banking.

 

[RegularJoe]

passthru works with VMware, you just need the right CPU and Chipset that supports vt-d. I have done it with fiberchannel and sashba's for a virtual freenas box.

 

[nightshade00013]

That was not the original question, what is in question is using Bhyve and with how it is implemented in FreeNAS to allow a device to be passed into a Bhyve VM.

ESXI is a bare metal hypervisor while Bhyve is not and relies on a FreeBSD like base installation and unless some specific options are available or can be set in the base installation passthrough can be more difficult to have happen.

 

[jlentz3]

So, I just said screw it and bought a "Gaming computer" (Well, at the parts at least.) for myself for xmas. With some extra GPU...lol

 

[nightshade00013]

That works. I am currently using a MSI Z170 SLI paired with a G4560 to mine with some Aorus GTX1080's. The third one showed up yesterday. Right now on Equihash I am getting around 600 H/s on each card and with everything I have running I am showing an average of 2KH/s https://zcash.flypool.org/miners/t1YNLL4M9FaAGWSKFujQjmmicK4zQepbCez

Now to find someone who wants a copy of Destiny 2 for 30 bucks and has a GTX1080 so they can activate it.....