The only extra system requirement is that your system have a working UEFI bootloader. I’ve been using this release within a qemu VM and it has been working great. In theory, it can run on a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 with UEFI, but your mileage may vary.
The only known issue at the moment is that apps and containers do not work. If others try this out, I’d be glad to hear feedback, positive or negative.
Bumping this for visibility! Thank you Joel for this amazing work, hoping to hear from other testers what kind of experience they have running an ARM based version of TrueNAS. We’ll be looking for that feedback to help set priority on this becoming an official thing down the road
This is awesome! The perfect use case could be for a small edge site or small offsite replication that doesn’t need apps, containers, or virtualization. Imagine an arm powered unit (like arm powered qnaps, synology or such) running truenas. A small 4 bay arm unit would be perfect for an offsite replica.
I would love to see what hardware this is best suited for, however as I see the ARM ecosystem:
Many Single-board raspberry pi and workalikes with little outside support for running anything via UEFI/etc… that if they do have something as basic as PCIe it will be in the form of an M.2 or sketchy flex-cable… (yes I know UEFI is not great either but it’s slowly becoming the standard due to the nonstandard nigtmare of ARM…)
Ampere workstation boards, which are nice but completely out of the price-range of a home/experimenting user.
as a result there is no equivalent of an Intel/AMD Desktop platform, there is big gap in this market… plus you have the obvious issue of ARM system implementations being a landmine of hardware quirks that make running generic images difficult, meanwhile x86 hardware is going to be less problematic/longer lived due to the more standard nature of the ISA as a whole. it’s designed with some expectation of compatibility.
don’t get me wrong, x86 is still full of garbage hardware, there’s an almost endless supply of overheating, bandwidth constrained, badly designed N100 systems and boards out there from “companies” that will never issue a firmware update nor with a “brand” that will exist when you look on ali-trash in a year. All these sort of OEMs do is badly implement a reference design and I’m sure they can just do that with an ARM SOC too…
That’s kind of the concern I noted above–Ampere servers are coming into their own, but not yet widely or economically available, at least for a home user, and SBCs just don’t seem to be there yet in terms of their capabilities. Though this server doesn’t look like an awful choice: https://www.ebay.com/itm/236143691826
Arm servers aren’t too outlandish for a home lab. I wouldn’t have made this port if I didn’t have one in my own home lab. I won’t say it was an objectively good financial decision, but it happened.
I am hopeful that the Arm SystemReady program will help fix the mess that SBCs are, on the software side of things. Out of curiosity, I installed vanilla Debian on a Pinebook Pro instead of using their platform-specific installer. Other than a broken UEFI implementation and missing wifi drivers, everything just worked. I see it as a good sign that things are going in the right direction, even if there’s nothing viable to provide a good experience on the market today.
The QNAP form factor seems like the ideal option to play to the strengths of this.
I’ll also point out that Apple silicon is blazing a trail for Arm. I could imagine a Mac Mini with a Thunderbolt drive enclosure is a viable option in the not-too-distant future. I’ve heard it’s a great balance between idle power consumption and performance.
I’m curious to see what class of hardware others get this running on, but for me, the use case is that I happen to have an Ampere server that needs to serve my media, ISOs, and backups.
it is very re-assuring to see you are aiming to get real hardware working, and not just as an ARM-based VM to hide an otherwise untamed platform.
Apple silicon is in a league of it’s own in terms of efficiency. I think it’s fascinating how far the reverse engineering project Asahi has gotten to running real Linux on the hardware although I do still wish that apple’s platform was in any-way standard. I personally really dislike MacOS and do not want to buy hardware that is only experimentally supported with other OSes like this. they are not doing much for the broader ARM landscape other than providing a really convenient way to run ARM64 VMs and being an ARM64 application target IMO.
then you have Microsoft which has uterly and completely failed to do anything useful over the past 13 years despite a near relentless effort to do so. (I am counting Windows RT, their first “desktop” Windows ARM OS).
First with Windows RT by treating the ARM platform like it had no place running a desktop OS with desktop apps, limiting the end monkey to run store apps unless you jailbroke it and ran ARM32 Win32 binaries.
Then it was with partnering with Qualcomm and still treating the whole deal as OEM only, failing to actually convince OEMs again, failing to ship or support developer-class hardware that wasn’t just a crappy tablet in a box that barely worked, failing to have an x64 emulator yet promising one for years (and turned out to be W11 only, which didn’t run on 835 devices), failing to see that Ampere could be a way out (it just needs drivers) and that broader support is truly necessary for such a platform… they aren’t helping here (with the caveat that they are pushing UEFI on ARM, even though it’s not for ARM Systemready support, just because they have always used UEFI even on 32-bit only windows RT/phone). their incompetence has only gotten worse with their push towards AI “enabled” hardware, of course.
I just wish that ‘midrange’ ARM platforms with today’s x86 style desktop formfactor existed at a ‘midrange’ price, but we aren’t there yet. The day that does happen I will be very happy that projects like yours exist. I do really admire projects like yours, please continue and post your results, I am very excited for the possibilities.
Got this installed as a VM in Parallels on my M4 Pro Mac Mini with no issue. Incredibly fast install. That just made for a quick little truenas lab! Fantastic work! I’ll test out passing through different external drives some more, but everything appears to work great so far for me.
Installed on a Mac Studio M4 with VMware Fusion - No problem so far and very fast! Will do some further testing. This will be very interesting in the future!
What are the minimum requirements? I’m certain more RAM is better but in your experience, and what RPIs have you tried?
I ask because I am curious as well. I found an Orange Pi Zero 2W with 4GB RAM and the Cortex-A53 CPU. It has WiFi, BT5.0, and is very small. Two USB-C connections, mini-HDMI as well. And the 40 GPIO header. You can purchase a small add-on which provides two USB-A type connections and an RJ-45 Ethernet connection.
Of course I can’t purchase this without it hurting my wallet due to all the crazy tariffs right now, but knowing is over half the battle.
The minimum requirements will essentially be the same as the regular release. TrueNAS Hardware Guide | TrueNAS Documentation Hub Notably, 8 GB of RAM, 16 GB boot device, two disks for storage, and the additional requirement of a working UEFI. TrueNAS isn’t really designed to run on very low end systems, and that holds true with the Arm variant too.
Unfortunately, I’d recommend avoiding buying the Orange Pi Zero 2W for TrueNAS. I believe it uses U-Boot, so you’d need to jump through hoops to get it to boot. I wouldn’t be surprised if the wifi driver isn’t standard, requiring a USB to ethernet adapter. You’d need a USB hub to connect connect the disks.
Your best bet would be the Raspberry Pi 5 8 GB or 16 GB or the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 8 GB. Unlike the similar other-brand-Pi options, I believe these have a working UEFI due to the Arm SystemReady certification. But be aware that nobody has confirmed whether this is compatible, so only spend the money if you’re willing to take the risk that you can’t get TrueNAS on it.
Thank you for the great response. I wasn’t sure if there was the same RAM requirements.
Well that is too bad. I like trying new things but I also cannot get this device in 8/16GB RAM.
I guess this project i really more for those folks who already have an RPI that meets the requirements. To purchase new is basically the same price as an N150 with 16GB RAM, and it comes with an M.2 slot. But that is if the goal is to only run TrueNAS. Most people who have an RPI are in it for other reasons, like experimenting and the GPIO, whereas the N150 doesn’t do those things.
I will keep my ears open to see how this project goes and hoping it ends up becoming a fully supported project.
In addition to the Ampere Altra/Altra Max boards mentioned earlier, there are others:
Pi 5 and RK3588 are extremely energy efficient and have just enough bandwidth to make a decent 2.5 or 5 Gbps NAS with 4+ SATA or SAS HDDs, and maybe one or two NVMes.
Radxa Orion O6 is nearly M1 level of performance for a few hundred bucks, and has SystemReady certification for at least much of it’s hardware features (full UEFI, can install standard Debian, Ubuntu, Windows on Arm, etc.)
Macs… which are frustratingly difficult to work with many PCIe devices, so building a customized NAS is harder but not impossible, especially if willing to stick to NVMe and/or Thunderbolt devices. The M4 mini with built-in 10 Gbps Ethernet is nice for a tiny 4W NAS.
There are also a few Compute Module NAS-specific boards rolling out over time, like the Axzez Interceptor, the T1-T0ast, and the Homelabs-Pi-Storage project for a fully-3D-printed custom Arm NAS for 3.5" HDDs.
Sorry I can’t link to those projects, but if you go to my Pi PCIe website, I’m working on adding them to my database, and testing them as well (I have samples of all of them).
Thunderbolt gets you to 3.0x4, correct? That would theoretically allow an external enclosure with a HBA and a bunch of spinners. Would likely become more problematic re: bandwidth as you start to deploy all-flash arrays?
My biggest issue with Macs is the use of Aquantia copper 10GbE chipsets, whose performance has been problematic in the past (aq113cs, in particular)
Seems to have a lot of stuff a NAS doesn’t need (e.g., multi-display), and misses some important stuff a NAS does need–like SATA or NVMe ports. Just under US$500 for a board with 64 GB of RAM isn’t bad, but like most mini-ITX boards, it’s just too limited in terms of onboard I/O.
