Intel Arc Pro B50 (16 GB) for Ollama / AI on TrueNAS – Feasible or Not?

TrueNAS General
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I’m considering the Intel Arc Pro B50 16 GB workstation GPU as an accelerator in my TrueNAS SCALE system. The specs are appealing — 16 GB VRAM, SFF form factor, and full AV1 hardware support — and the current price point is around $349.

Intel has a guide for running Ollama with Open WebUI on Ubuntu 22.04 using their Arc GPU driver, oneAPI Base Toolkit, and IPEX-LLM, which makes llama.cpp run accelerated on Arc. That works fine on Ubuntu because Intel maintains drivers and packages there.

What I’m trying to figure out is how this translates to TrueNAS SCALE:

  • Since SCALE is Debian-based, you can’t simply apt install Intel’s stack on the host without risking update breakage.
  • Would the right approach be to either pass the card into an Ubuntu VM and follow Intel’s instructions, or run a container that bundles oneAPI and mounts /dev/dri?
  • Are the same environment variables (OLLAMA_NUM_GPU=999, ZES_ENABLE_SYSMAN=1, etc.) still needed inside the VM/container?
  • And finally, has anyone actually managed to get Intel GPU acceleration recognized in SCALE, given that the built-in UI only has NVIDIA runtime hooks?

In short: does anyone have firsthand experience running Ollama (or similar AI workloads) with an Arc card under SCALE, and if so, what’s the cleanest setup path?

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I haven’t watched this yet, but does this provide any answers? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QW1j4r7--3U

Drivers on Linux might be the biggest issue for you, on BSD I wouldn’t even try it.

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Hey, did you buy it and have you been able to use it? How did you do that (if)?

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As of now the current kernel doesn’t yet support the B-Series cards. As far as i know, the first version to most likely support the B-series cards will be 26.04 in april of next year…

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I ordered the B50 pro anyways and I will pass it via an VM directly.

I’m still on 24.xxx since I didn’t had the time to change all of my VMs.

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If you migrate to 25.04.2.5 you don’t have to migrate your vms, iX reversed the vm change to incus and any version of 25.04.2 uses the same vm backend that 24.10 uses. You shouldn’t have any problems with your vms when you update.

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Just updated it, flawlessly!
Thank you!

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BTW: I have ordered the B50 Pro yesterday and should have it in my hands later today.

I already set-up an Ubuntu server VM and installed docker.
Now for testing I will use Ollama & OpenWebUI with Docker.

I just could not really find a good TTS yesterday, Piper seems to be unavailable to work with Openwebui for now. At least I didn’t find proper images, that either support MaryTTS or OpenAI-API properly.

Any recommendations from your side? In the best case, it should also later work with my Home-Assistant voice-preview.

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just a quick question: Will the B50 Pro the only gpu in your system or does your gpu have an igpu? Because if it’s the only one you can’t use it in vms because it gets blocked by truenas…

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I use a 5600GT, which has an iGPU - so nope - I should be able to use it (for now I can not use the iGPU to pass through)

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I am leaning towards an w7800 now that im doing more research. Sr-IOV works on the w7800 and the rocm drivers work with local ai.

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Welp. Got my B50 today. Feeling like I should have maybe poked around here first…Dayum.

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Also just got a B50 last week and am trying to do the exact same thing as @maeffjus with home assistant. I also bought a GPU for training a voice model im on the latest TrueNAS anyone had luck getting this to run?

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Also forgot to mention that Im still working on the whole ReSize bar thing I think we all kinda just bought it without reading everything lol.

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Well, the driver’s there but the B-series and xe driver depend a lot more on ReBAR (Resizeable BAR) than the A-series and i915 - apparently it can’t even handle video decode through libva without proper support.

@Trotsky does your board support ReBAR? If so try enabling it and then try offloading a simple workload to the B50 like video transcoding through Jellyfin, see if it faults on you.

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My board does not but I am trying to add it via GitHub - xCuri0/ReBarUEFI: Resizable BAR for (almost) any UEFI system

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I have been looking into this for a while now and ended up bricking my NAS because I tried to add Resize BAR. Anyway I found this that might be use full in what we are trying to do here Link. We still have to wait for 26.04 in April allegedly but this can still be run in a VM till then and it uses the latest intel IPEX libs if you want to try it out. I Will try it when I fix my NAS and let you know how it works out!

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How were you able to get the B50 to work with Ollama and Piper and whisper Im looking to do the same with HA Year Of The Voice?

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After watching this play out over the last few months and testing paths myself, the conclusion is pretty clear.

  • Intel Arc Pro B-series (B50) is not reliably usable on the TrueNAS SCALE host today. Even where the driver exists, B-series cards depend heavily on Resizable BAR, and without full kernel + firmware support they can fail basic workloads (libva decode, compute, etc.).

  • Installing Intel’s oneAPI / IPEX-LLM stack on the SCALE host is risky and has already resulted in broken systems for some users.

  • The only clean, working approach right now is to pass the B50 through to an Ubuntu 22.04 VM and follow Intel’s Ollama / OpenWebUI guide there. Multiple users have confirmed this works.

  • Environment variables like OLLAMA_NUM_GPU=999 and ZES_ENABLE_SYSMAN=1 are still required, but only inside the VM where Intel’s runtime stack exists.

  • Native host-level support for Arc B-series looks like 26.04+ territory at the earliest, and SCALE will lag that by design.

TL;DR

  • Arc Pro B50 + SCALE host: not ready

  • Arc Pro B50 + Ubuntu VM passthrough: works today

Hopefully this saves the next person some time (and hardware regret).

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I have overhauled my system and now I have Resize bar

This also seems to be my experience

Im working on that right now will report back

Well its to late now I will just wait till the drivers are good