[Sticky] Running Big Sur (beta) on Intel Macs

Posted by: @softraid-support

What a rant!

 

I am leaving it posted, as it is also humorous. You forgot to give any thanks to Apple development who helped us in our efforts to be late with this. Its a crazy time, but we did the best we could.

And with California again limiting office hours, I missed the Intel issue when we added M1 support to the SoftRAID 6 beta.

In the long run SoftRAID 6 is going to be as reliable as we usually make it. Issues like the Beta 47 "M1/Intel" issue come from rushing to make users happy, by pushing doubly hard to add M1 support. Once we get the beta completely stable again, updates will likely be a lot slower.

 

Have a merry Christmas!

I am surprised you justified his trolling with a response. I feel bad for him. He's at home alone, and his only friends are the ones he talks to in the forums. 

I just want to say I appreciate the hard work on this and the responsiveness. Its easy to roll out beta after beta when you are not selling mission critical software. but when you are in the backup, redundancy business, you have a much greater duty of care to your customers, even if it slows things down.

Keep up the good work and happy holidays. 

@softraid-support I for one appreciate the help.  I know that making drivers can't be easy.  Happy Holidays!

https://softraid.com/updates/SoftRAID%206.0.1%20b43.dmg

@softraid-support

Yes, I lost a couple of days on this ... even resorting to clean install of Big Sur 11.1. Humorous other post, maybe, but still an enormous waste of time & head scratching, & especially when OWC provides no option to avoid the updates (ie, the former usually being depreciated).

I also found this wasn't a 'straight line' in terms of trying to resolve: b47 interacted with and messed up other kexts including those from Universal Audio, Sonarworks, Paragon etc (system extension cache perhaps?). In any case, this was difficult to track down & in the final analysis, other third party drivers could only be installed to function correctly if they were installed *before* the softRAID drivers.

Waste of time, frustration and inability to access large amounts of work data on RAID volumes as well as other key hardware components not working (as per above kext dopiness).

In any case, confirmed: rolling back to b43 works as it should. Lets hope you be considerably more careful & respectful of others' requirements next time.

Same here b43 worked ok, b46b needed old staged extensions to be removed- spl.kext & zfs.kext. With B47b I get

(base) ElTico@x86_64-apple-darwin13 ~ % sudo kextload -v 6 /Library/Extensions/SoftRAID.kext
Kext user-space log filter changed from 0xff2 to 0xfff.
Kext kernel-space log filter changed from 0xff2 to 0xfff.
Kext library architecture set to x86_64.
Executing: /usr/bin/kmutil load -p /Library/Extensions/SoftRAID.kext
Error Domain=KMErrorDomain Code=31 "Error occurred while building a collection:
1: One or more binaries has an error which prevented linking. See other errors.
2: Could not use 'com.softraid.driver.SoftRAID' because: Failed to bind '__ZN18IOMemoryDescriptor16setPreparationIDEv' in 'com.softraid.driver.SoftRAID' (at offset 0x2b47a in __TEXT, __text) as could not find a kext which exports this symbol
com.softraid.driver.SoftRAID specific:
1: Failed to bind '__ZN18IOMemoryDescriptor16setPreparationIDEv' in 'com.softraid.driver.SoftRAID' (at offset 0x2b47a in __TEXT, __text) as could not find a kext which exports this symbol
" UserInfo={NSLocalizedDescription=Error occurred while building a collection:
1: One or more binaries has an error which prevented linking. See other errors.
2: Could not use 'com.softraid.driver.SoftRAID' because: Failed to bind '__ZN18IOMemoryDescriptor16setPreparationIDEv' in 'com.softraid.driver.SoftRAID' (at offset 0x2b47a in __TEXT, __text) as could not find a kext which exports this symbol
com.softraid.driver.SoftRAID specific:
1: Failed to bind '__ZN18IOMemoryDescriptor16setPreparationIDEv' in 'com.softraid.driver.SoftRAID' (at offset 0x2b47a in __TEXT, __text) as could not find a kext which exports this symbol

b47 works on my other iMac Pro running Catalina 

So back to b43 or b46

Big Sur has some strange (security) issues. I think part of your problem was extensions that cause other extensions not to load.
The Intel issue with b47 was unexpected, the code that changed from B43 forward had nothing to do with intel, something was weird in xcode. We identified it, but have not worked around it yet, and now it is xmas.

Not surprising some extensions have to be loaded before others. If SoftRAID is in the middle of any thing reproducible, let me know, we can create an internal note so if others run into it, we have some data. Many of the large studios are our customers also.

@nivekeel

More details needed.

Which OS?

Which driver version?

Which RAID level are you using and which format?

@nivekeel

I may have missed answering this, maybe you saw this from other posts.

Use the beta 43 version and see if that works.

https://support.apple.com/en-lk/guide/mac-help/mchl768f7291/mac

Otherwise post a SoftRAID tech support file.

Also appreciate the support by @softraid-support. I'm a retired software engineer and know how hard it can be to debug software issues, especially with so many configurations and with constantly changing base software provided by others (i.e. Apple). Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!!!

Thanks. I also understand many who post are frustrated that things are not working as they hoped. As long as I can solve most problems relatively quickly, the occasional rants are fine, sometimes humorous. I think most users appreciate the effort to help them out.

Thanks and Merry Christmas and Happy New Year also!

Any other thoughts about https://srforums.wpengine.com/forum/postid/6053/ ?

Post a SoftRAID Tech Support file. This should not be the case.

@raoulduke-esq

I noticed the exact same issue after a restart too.......

Also running B43 on a MacBook Pro 16

Can you both attach SoftRAID Tech Support files?

I am glad you can find humor in comments such as those by 23WOMe. I'm sure I am one of many who appreciate your work. I can imagine the complexity of creating a driver for RAID systems, and understand that it isn't possible to test all the various configurations of computers in which it will be used. I greatly appreciate that you have been keeping us informed as well as being very responsive to the very many posts which are coming in. I notice that you have been posting on the 26th and 27th - which is admirable.