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RedPill - the new loader for 6.2.4 - Discussion


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Hello everyone, after various installation tests of DSM 7.0.1 and functionality tests (it seems to me to work correctly), migration test from DSM 6.2.3 up3 to DSM 7.0.1 all done in v.m. mode and all are successful with the image redpill-DS918 + _7.0.1-42218_b1635406499 I wanted to upgrade the DSM (migration from DSM6.2.3 up3 to DSN 7.0.1) of my machine running in baremetal mode (supermicro motherboard , hhd SATA and 100/1000 network), I needed to know something that I could not test with vm installations; my machine has 2 NVMe which I use as SSD cache, does anyone know if the redpill has problems with these disks ?? When migrating, it is better to disassemble them and then reassemble them once the upgrade has been carried out ??? (I seemed to have read something about it somewhere). There are additional drivers in the image redpill as it was for the 104b loader ??? (also on this I seemed to have read something in the forum about it) does anyone know something ??? thank you

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HI all ! :-)  @WiteWulf @pocopico

After many months of following this thread I was able to play with some VM's (actually Fusion) and successfully install DSM 7.0.1 (918+) on them. 

Now I would jump on my BareMetal rig, firstly with some test HDDs then with the working ones. 

 

My HW is pretty simple (the one in signature): Gigabyte C246-m with Intel i7-9700T CPU, two onboard NICs (i-219 and a 1000e) plus an added NIC (Realtek 8125 2,5Gbe working thanks to extra_lma in Jun's loader 🙏 DSM 6.2.3u3), and two NVMe disks working as RAID1 cache.
Now, considering that my mobo belongs to Intel 300's series and so it's SATA controller is 8th/9th gen and therefore I will go for DS918+ setup, some questions for you: 

  • To your experience do you expect any problems with the correct recognition of its 8 SATA ports? I need them all! ;-)
  • IS there any chance of having both the 2 NVMe working as caching drives as expected? Please if someone could provide a procedure to successfully patch the necessary library, post it in replying to this msg. Thanks! 
  • I truly need my Realtek 8125 to work correctly because I've implemented a 2,5Gbe ring that's working very well. But I might consider upgrading to a 10Gb NIC if needed (which one is most compatible at the moment?)
  • If I buy a Synology 10Gb NIC, I would have the chance to use QC? (which now is not enabled because I was not able the change the MAC address in a hardware manner).

from a software's point of view I don't need that much:

  • I do not use Docker at the moment.
  • TM MUST work because I absolutely need a backup. It's very important to me.
  • I do use extensively PLEX and I need it, with HW acceleration. The lack of it would be a no-go for me. 
  • I do use NextCloud, installed with this procedure . It needs Apache web server, mariaDB and Php. The lack of it would be a no-go for me. 
  • It would be nice if Synology Photos works correctly, including the facial recognition. 
  • WakeOnLan must work, on all the NICs. The lack of it would be a no-go for me. 
  • Sleep should work and HDD hibernation too, as I don't want useless spins of my HDDs. CPU should work at the correct frequencies, I really hate waste of energy and noise.
  • QuickConnect would be nice if it's possible... 

Last but not least please suggest me the best branch of git which is now more robust and stable, including the necessary compiled drivers. 

 

Sorry for the length of my post and thanks and gratitude 🙏 to all who will have the patience of reading it all and answer all the questions.☺️

Edited by Hackaro
grammar
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10 hours ago, Hackaro said:

Now I would jump on my BareMetal rig, firstly with some test HDDs then with the working ones. 

Perfect, as this is ment for developers and not ready you could test all the things you want and help the community out with your test rig. Quickconnect is impossible without a real sn and mac. And even this is not advised by anyone.

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23 minutes ago, Unregistrado said:

Perfect, as this is ment for developers and not ready you could test all the things you want and help the community out with your test rig. Quickconnect is impossible without a real sn and mac. And even this is not advised by anyone.

I will for sure help the community with my experience with my test rig. Therefore I will not post useless comment as yours which has answered none of my questions. 

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Hello. Like others, I wanted to upgrade my instance 6.2.3.25426 to DSM7. After going through the steps of the instructions, I received a working version of DSM 7.0.1-42218U2 without disks. The only thing left is to migrate to new instance. However after switching the SATA controller (built into the motherboard) into a VM with DSM7 I got errors:  "we've detected errors on the hard drives" or uninitialized disks, depending on the moment when I switch the controller with disks to VM.  I found posts with the same troubles but no right way. Are there any ideas?

11.jpg

12.jpg

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17 hours ago, Null said:

redpill has been gone for many months, does anyone know what happened to redpill? or any information?

without redpill, what should we do with the next major version update of Synology?


Redpill as in the project isn't gone, but the core developer(s) @ThorGroup is. No, unfortunately there is no additional information information available regarding. Thanks to the developers being awesome and making the project open source anyone can contribute this time. You should not use this project if you depend on future updates or intend to make this a production system/make it available on the Internet. As mentioned before, it's only for testing purposes and that will probably always be the case.
 

11 hours ago, Hackaro said:

HI all ! :-)  @WiteWulf @pocopico

After many months of following this thread I was able to play with some VM's (actually Fusion) and successfully install DSM 7.0.1 (918+) on them. 

Now I would jump on my BareMetal rig, firstly with some test HDDs then with the working ones. 

 

My HW is pretty simple (the one in signature): Gigabyte C246-m with Intel i7-9700T CPU, two onboard NICs (i-219 and a 1000e) plus an added NIC (Realtek 8125 2,5Gbe working thanks to extra_lma in Jun's loader 🙏 DSM 6.2.3u3), and two NVMe disks working as RAID1 cache.
Now, considering that my mobo belongs to Intel 300's series and so it's SATA controller is 8th/9th gen and therefore I will go for DS918+ setup, some questions for you: 

  • To your experience do you expect any problems with the correct recognition of its 8 SATA ports? I need them all! ;-)
  • IS there any chance of having both the 2 NVMe working as caching drives as expected? Please if someone could provide a procedure to successfully patch the necessary library, post it in replying to this msg. Thanks! 
  • I truly need my Realtek 8125 to work correctly because I've implemented a 2,5Gbe ring that's working very well. But I might consider upgrading to a 10Gb NIC if needed (which one is most compatible at the moment?)
  • If I buy a Synology 10Gb NIC, I would have the chance to use QC? (which now is not enabled because I was not able the change the MAC address in a hardware manner).

from a software's point of view I don't need that much:

  • I do not use Docker at the moment.
  • TM MUST work because I absolutely need a backup. It's very important to me.
  • I do use extensively PLEX and I need it, with HW acceleration. The lack of it would be a no-go for me. 
  • I do use NextCloud, installed with this procedure . It needs Apache web server, mariaDB and Php. The lack of it would be a no-go for me. 
  • It would be nice if Synology Photos works correctly, including the facial recognition. 
  • WakeOnLan must work, on all the NICs. The lack of it would be a no-go for me. 
  • Sleep should work and HDD hibernation too, as I don't want useless spins of my HDDs. CPU should work at the correct frequencies, I really hate waste of energy and noise.
  • QuickConnect would be nice if it's possible... 

Last but not least please suggest me the best branch of git which is now more robust and stable, including the necessary compiled drivers. 

 

Sorry for the length of my post and thanks and gratitude 🙏 to all who will have the patience of reading it all and answer all the questions.☺️

I wouldn't recommend running Plex on DSM if you are highly dependent on performance. It's way better on a Linux VM with a later kernel and a GPU in passthrough. Some have also reported DSM 7 to be unstable when stressed, not sure thats only tied to Docker or also the Plex package though. I've never been able to get sleep to work, but honestly it's not recommened either as it most likely will decrease the life expectancy of your drives depending on how often you wake them up. Spinning up/down is what kills most drives, not spinning 24/7. I was also looking into this for a long time, but concluded with spindown being a silly thing unless you are pretty sure that the disks can be spinned down for at least a day at a time, preferable over several days. QuickConnect and face recognition is only working for real devices as it requires a real serial/mac. There are ways to get around those limitations, but at that point I would highly recommend to buy a real Synology. Especially if you want something that just works and doesn't waste energy. They are great devices, low power consumption and rock solid. Without the use of docker the performance is also not that bad given the dated hardware they use.

There is no such thing as robust or stable branch. Everything is done in development branches that might break tomorrow, but a good starting point is the config used by TinyCore: https://github.com/pocopico/tinycore-redpill/blob/main/global_config.json
 

23 minutes ago, J0K3R said:

Hello. Like others, I wanted to upgrade my instance 6.2.3.25426 to DSM7. After going through the steps of the instructions, I received a working version of DSM 7.0.1-42218U2 without disks. The only thing left is to migrate to new instance. However after switching the SATA controller (built into the motherboard) into a VM with DSM7 I got errors:  "we've detected errors on the hard drives" or uninitialized disks, depending on the moment when I switch the controller with disks to VM.  I found posts with the same troubles but no right way. Are there any ideas?

11.jpg

12.jpg


You need to play around with SataPortMap in order to get the disk order correct.
Havent tried TinyCore much myself, but it has a auto-detect feature that might help you. I also recommend to read through the other link with very easy to understand information on how SataPortMap and DiskIdxMap works.

 

 

Edited by NeoID
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On 10/30/2021 at 1:06 PM, hkjc said:

Hello together,

 

Can someone, please help how to add "disable_mtrr_trim" command to bromolow_user_ config.json, thanks.

in the user_config.json you should to add the following

 

"disable_mtrr_trim"= "1"

 

in my case my N40L recognize the command and I have all memory available in my AMD

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On 10/16/2021 at 10:00 PM, ed_co said:

Looks very nice. When are you putting this project in the loader section?

It looks like the first page is not edited since a long time.

If there are new changes/features/updates/faqs/links to builds, should be great to have it edited in the first page (like version history/time-lined...). Is very hard to follow through that huge unorganized thread right now. Just my opinion.

Such a great job!

Thanks

Again, came back after a while (I have been busy changing jobs), and again, I don't know how to even start. Apart from the first post which is highly outdated, I don't know if there were any advances on it, if it is usable, or how to start or whatever. Looks like the original poster ThorGroup is not even replying since long time ago... is it abandoned like jun? No change logs, just a huge thread, that seriously I don't have the time to read the 144 pages of it... Don't get me wrong I appreciate there are people working/using it. I am just lost and a little guidance should be great.

I am still very happy with my Xpenology baremetal Asrock H370M-ITX 918+ with last  jun loader. Is stable and works well, but I wouldn't mind to update if it is reliable enough. Not interested in VM but baremetal.

Thanks!!

Edited by ed_co
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19 hours ago, iceman said:

Open Vm tool is updated add support dsm 7, please check in use

 

https://github.com/NeverEatYellowSwissSnow/synology-dsm-open-vm-tools

I get "Invalid file format. Contact developer." 😕

 

tinycore-redpill ds918p DSM 7.0.1-42218 Update 2 on ESXi 7

 

Edit: I guess I have to build it myself first... 🙈

Edited by fafner
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18 minutes ago, ed_co said:

Again, came back after a while (I have been busy changing jobs), and again, I don't know how to even start. Apart from the first post which is highly outdated, I don't know if there were any advances on it, if it is usable, or how to start or whatever. Looks like the original poster ThorGroup is not even replying since long time ago... is it abandoned like jun? No change logs, just a huge thread, that seriously I don't have the time to read the 144 pages of it... Don't get me wrong I appreciate there are people working/using it. I am just lost and a little guidance should be great.

I am still very happy with my Xpenology baremetal Asrock H370M-ITX 918+ with last  jun loader. Is stable and works well, but I wouldn't mind to update if it is reliable enough. Not interested in VM but baremetal.

Thanks!!

1) Yes it's "abandoned" like Juns, but this time it's open source
2) To be honest... If you don't want to read the 144+ pages you should invest into a real Synology that just works. Here there will be dragons (and lots of)
3) Most/all people use this for testing only and it's not as stable as Juns loader

4) If you are happy with Juns loader I recommend you to stay on it, especially if you use it for "production". Redpill is not ready for production. If you have hardware to spare you should look into the amazing TinyCore project to get up and running quickly. Synology will also launch DSM 7.1 sometimes Q1, so the grand question is if that will be supported/stable at all going forward

Edited by NeoID
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18 minutes ago, ed_co said:

Again, came back after a while (I have been busy changing jobs), and again, I don't know how to even start. Apart from the first post which is highly outdated, I don't know if there were any advances on it, if it is usable, or how to start or whatever. Looks like the original poster ThorGroup is not even replying since long time ago... is it abandoned like jun? No change logs, just a huge thread, that seriously I don't have the time to read the 144 pages of it... Don't get me wrong I appreciate there are people working/using it. I am just lost and a little guidance should be great.

I am still very happy with my Xpenology baremetal Asrock H370M-ITX 918+ with last  jun loader. Is stable and works well, but I wouldn't mind to update if it is reliable enough. Not interested in VM but baremetal.

Thanks!!

Ed_co, just check this website: 

https://xpenology.club/install-dsm-7-on-baremetal-or-vm/

please make sure you check with a spare hdd and usb stick. If you can install dsm 7 on your system then you will know that hardware is supported or not.

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52 minutes ago, NeoID said:

1) Yes it's "abandoned" like Juns, but this time it's open source
2) To be honest... If you don't want to read the 144+ pages you should invest into a real Synology that just works. Here there will be dragons (and lots of)
3) Most/all people use this for testing only and it's not as stable as Juns loader

4) If you are happy with Juns loader I recommend you to stay on it, especially if you use it for "production". Redpill is not ready for production. If you have hardware to spare you should look into the amazing TinyCore project to get up and running quickly. Synology will also launch DSM 7.1 sometimes Q1, so the grand question is if that will be supported/stable at all going forward

1) So sad... I guess he didn't even said it and just left, right? I had hopes, seriously.

2) I can have some time, but not that much. With Jun's was so easy and I was able to make it work very quick.

3) Gotcha

4) I will stick with it for the moment. I don't see any benefit from moving to DSM 7, to be honest. Can anyone explain if there are?

I just thought that as time passed, maybe this was more mature.

Thanks for your nice and structured reply.

 

51 minutes ago, Unregistrado said:

Ed_co, just check this website: 

https://xpenology.club/install-dsm-7-on-baremetal-or-vm/

please make sure you check with a spare hdd and usb stick. If you can install dsm 7 on your system then you will know that hardware is supported or not.

That's very useful, thanks!

Edited by ed_co
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2 minutes ago, ed_co said:

I will stick with it for the moment. I don't see any benefit from moving to DSM 7, to be honest. Can anyone explain if there are?

 Features: https://www.synology.com/en-global/DSM70

The biggest change is Synology Photos which is a bastard child between two perfectly good apps (moments+dsphotos). It's extremely lacking in a lot of ways as of yet.

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On 1/25/2022 at 2:35 PM, eldi said:

DSM 3617xs. Failed to install the file. The file is probably corrupted.

 

Successfully installed on DSM3615xs baremetal, but cannot install it on 3617xs.
I was following this guide, but I typed "sudo ./rploader.sh build broadwell-7.0.1-42218" in WINSCP PuTTY instead of "sudo ./rploader.sh build bromolow-7.0.1-42218" because its on 3617xs .So after going through all steps of this guide, at the last step where you need to select a .pat file the installing stopes at 56%.

I have no idea what could've cause this issue any help would be appreciated!

image.png

@eldi: I have exactly the same issue and havn't found any help. I've you found a solution, I would be happy. 

Edited by zahni
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15 hours ago, zahni said:

@eldi: I have exactly the same issue and havn't found any help. I've you found a solution, I would be happy. 

@zahniWell I found this post 

But its quite hard to understand what to do. If you can figure it out please notify me via @eldi.

Edited by eldi
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21 hours ago, NeoID said:


Redpill as in the project isn't gone, but the core developer(s) @ThorGroup is. No, unfortunately there is no additional information information available regarding. Thanks to the developers being awesome and making the project open source anyone can contribute this time. You should not use this project if you depend on future updates or intend to make this a production system/make it available on the Internet. As mentioned before, it's only for testing purposes and that will probably always be the case.
 

I wouldn't recommend running Plex on DSM if you are highly dependent on performance. It's way better on a Linux VM with a later kernel and a GPU in passthrough. Some have also reported DSM 7 to be unstable when stressed, not sure thats only tied to Docker or also the Plex package though. I've never been able to get sleep to work, but honestly it's not recommened either as it most likely will decrease the life expectancy of your drives depending on how often you wake them up. Spinning up/down is what kills most drives, not spinning 24/7. I was also looking into this for a long time, but concluded with spindown being a silly thing unless you are pretty sure that the disks can be spinned down for at least a day at a time, preferable over several days. QuickConnect and face recognition is only working for real devices as it requires a real serial/mac. There are ways to get around those limitations, but at that point I would highly recommend to buy a real Synology. Especially if you want something that just works and doesn't waste energy. They are great devices, low power consumption and rock solid. Without the use of docker the performance is also not that bad given the dated hardware they use.

There is no such thing as robust or stable branch. Everything is done in development branches that might break tomorrow, but a good starting point is the config used by TinyCore: https://github.com/pocopico/tinycore-redpill/blob/main/global_config.json
 

 

Thanks for your long answer. I've analysed the HW in official Synology... and it's quite embarrassing to me, especially compared to price, I will give a look to TinyCore as starting point. Or even to Unraid at this point. I do agree with you about the spinning up/down, in fact I'm working with NAS shutdown most of the times to preserve the HDD's life. 

I truly hope this open project goes on and become much more stable in the near future. 

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On 1/25/2022 at 4:58 PM, iceman said:

Open Vm tool is updated add support dsm 7, please check in use

 

https://github.com/NeverEatYellowSwissSnow/synology-dsm-open-vm-tools

Qiescence (Snapshot) does not work. 

 

2022-01-27T12:20:44.657Z In(05) vcpu-2 - [msg.snapshot.quiesce.vmerr] The guest OS has reported an error during quiescing.
2022-01-27T12:20:44.657Z In(05)+ vcpu-2 - The error code was: 3
2022-01-27T12:20:44.657Z In(05)+ vcpu-2 - The error message was: Error when enabling the sync provider.
2022-01-27T12:20:44.657Z In(05) vcpu-2 - ----------------------------------------
2022-01-27T12:20:44.659Z In(05) vcpu-2 - VigorTransportProcessClientPayload: opID=4501266d-01-32-28e5 seq=8814: Receiving Bootstrap.MessageReply request.
2022-01-27T12:20:44.659Z In(05) vcpu-2 4501266d-01-32-28e5 VigorTransport_ServerSendResponse opID=4501266d-01-32-28e5 seq=8814: Completed Bootstrap request.
2022-01-27T12:20:44.659Z In(05) vcpu-2 - ToolsBackup: changing quiesce state: STARTED -> ERROR_WAIT
2022-01-27T12:20:46.661Z In(05) vcpu-2 - ToolsBackup: changing quiesce state: ERROR_WAIT -> IDLE
2022-01-27T12:20:46.661Z In(05) vcpu-2 - ToolsBackup: changing quiesce state: IDLE -> DONE
2022-01-27T12:20:46.661Z In(05) vcpu-2 - SnapshotVMXTakeSnapshotComplete: Done with snapshot 'VM Snapshot 27.1.2022, 13:20:36': 0
2022-01-27T12:20:46.662Z In(05) vcpu-2 - DISKLIB-CBT   :ChangeTrackerESX_DestroyMirror: Destroyed mirror node 126d1cea-4dd2938-cbtmirror.
2022-01-27T12:20:46.727Z In(05) vcpu-2 - DISKLIB-CBT   :ChangeTrackerESX_DestroyMirror: Destroyed mirror node 13a31cde-50c2934-cbtmirror.
2022-01-27T12:20:46.729Z In(05) vcpu-2 - SnapshotVMXTakeSnapshotComplete: Snapshot 0 failed: Failed to quiesce the virtual machine (29).
2022-01-27T12:20:46.729Z In(05) vcpu-2 - VVolObjNotifySnapshotDone: isEnabled: 1

 

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Hello everyone as I wrote that I would have done a few days ago today I upgraded (migrated) the DSM from 6.2.3 up3 to 7.0.1 (42218) up2 baremetal from image redpill-DS918 + _7.0.1-42218_b1635406499.img, everything went right everything works correctly (or almost ..); as I feared, the system no longer sees me the two NVMe cards that I use for the cache which therefore I cannot mount, someone knows and wants to help me ??? Are the patches used for version 6.2.3 okay or are there others ??? Thank you

Edited by PincoPalla
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guys, is there something wrong with the 6.2.4 loader?

I have an Hp Gen 8 , with esxi, the bootlader is on sata disk 0:0 , my extra hard disk is at sata disk 0:0

i have below configured

    "SataPortMap": "2",
    "DiskIdxMap": "00"

 

if i do this : sudo ./rploader.sh build bromolow-7.0.1-42218

i can perfect install a DSM 7 system, it works perfect had it running for a few days, during .pat upload the installed told me DSM is going to be installed on DISK 2

 

i do the exact same process, now with this command, a clean host in esxu

sudo ./rploader.sh build bromolow-6.2.4-25556

 

i upload that specific pat file, again i get the message that it will install on disk 2 , it completes to 100%

i do a reboot, but its back at the setup start again?? for a new .pat file upload?

 

whats wrong?

 

image.png.a18b927924adecdd26feccc66d7d0513.png

image.png.f1b0850c8c808951aa957628e3db4d92.png

 

After this reboot, i'm back at point 1

 

 

what could be wrong?

 

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I'm having a little post install issue with my xpenology. I successfully managed to upgrade to 7.0.1 using the ds918+ profile. Only thing that doesn't seem to work are scheduled boot (not really a huge problem) and hard drive sleep which is kind of a problem because the system is drawing 50W constantly. 

I have the following hardware: 

 

ASRock 90-MXB6N0-A0UAYZ Mainboard J4105-ITX Intel J4105 CPU m-ITX DVI/HDMI DDR4

Syba SI-PEX40064 4 Port SATA III PCI-EXPRESS 2.0 x 1 Controller

Back when the NAS was built these components were recommended for a low price and low energy build with pretty much ootb compatibility. 

 

I hope someone can direct me to a fix.

Thanks

Edited by The_Dave
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