DIY compatible Waves Soundgrid Server

[Tubetec]

I didnt download it or anything but it does look like the image file plus native  plugins is available ,  from the usual sources who  brought you lots of cro barred plugins over the years 

I see a few on Ebay selling  the older SG servers , usb memory module often removed by the looks of it .
I guess you have the option of moving the licence onto other hardware .

I think I did also see legacy versions of SG server on the website ,available for download after you create an account .
I should have a spare computer arriving with intel gb ethernet and suitable to run the OS  so I might give it a try next week .

 

[Di_Sousa]

Hardware specs of an original Waves Soundgrid server:

Processor: Intel® Core i5-4590K
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H81N
RAM: 8GB
HDD: 4G Flash Drive.

You could save some money if you look into a used server. These go from 50-500$ and survive better in a live rack.

Hi Cyrano,
I posted the hardware also for an original waves server in the first post. Those specs were for the most expensive unit of the range.

but you can use any i5 or i7 processor, although the ethernet/network card has to be a Gigabit Intel card.

 

[Di_Sousa]

Ok so lets assume we have the hardware side in the bag ,
let say we can get an image of a box fully loaded with plugs , and get it running ,
Now you need a second pc to run the daw end , that pc has SG software on it , that wants ,presumably
to authenticate or verify or phone home or check licenceing  ,surely ? 

You need a server, so you have really low latency.
Thats the Soundgrid server, the unit that will process the plugins. thats one thing and it's what I want to build.

You need then a Computer (MAC or PC) running Waves Multirack (the software to load the plugins) and you need the plugins themselves, to be legal you need Licences for Multirack software and the Plugins.

If you don't want the server you can use Multirack Native, so the computer that runs multirack also processes the plugins, thats fine but you will have higher latencies

 

[GreyboxAudio]

Has anybody tried compiling the open source stuff from waves?

 

[GreyboxAudio]

Has anybody tried compiling the open source stuff from waves?

Has anybody I've tried compiling the open source stuff from waves.



Important 2020 Update!
Please skip everything from here on and jump straight to
https://groupdiy.com/index.php?topic=71385.msg958215#msg958215




You're going to need the following things to get started:
- the source files for kernel versions 2016 & 2017 from https://www.waves.com/legal/soundgrid-server-open-source-code
- Ubuntu 12.04 (srsly!)
- around 30GB of available storage for your Ubuntu System (using a VM works as well)
- horsepower & time (more on that later)

Setting up Ubuntu is pretty straightforward and you don't need to change any of the defaults during the installation. Once you're up and running you should get two popups regarding updates and upgrading to 14.04. Installing updates is neccessary but do not upgrade to 14.04. Or you can close them and just do it from the terminal

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Once that's done, reboot. Now open firefox, go to https://www.waves.com/legal/soundgrid-server-open-source-code and download the kernel packages. We're going to need some files from the older archive later on. But for now open the terminal and extract just the 2017 release

cd Downloads
tar -xvf sglinux-9.7.10.1.tar.gz

There's two folders in there
- app
- ubuntu-packege [sic!]

app contains the tools that are included in soundgrid os, ubuntu-packege includes all the compilers and dependencies, to build the stuff from the app folder.

That's why we're going to build the ubuntu packages first, starting with libstc++-6. There's a couple of dependencies that need to be installed first

sudo apt-get install dpkg-dev debhelper g++-multilib libc6-dev-i386 lib32gcc1 m4 libtool autoconf2.64 automake zlib1g-dev gawk patchutils gperf bison flex gettext texinfo sharutils libcloog-ppl-dev libmpc-dev libmpfr-dev libgmp-dev libelfg0-dev dejagnu autogen realpath chrpath quilt doxygen graphviz gsfonts-x11 texlive-latex-base automake1.10 texi2html fdupes nasm uuid-dev

Now cd your way into the libstdc++-6 folder, extract the source files and apply the changes from waves

dpkg-source -x  gcc-4.6_4.6.3-1ubuntu5.dsc

cd into the newly created folder and build that sh!t

dpkg-buildpackage -b

This is going to take a while! I used a Virtualbox on a trashan MacPro and had assigned 12cores & 16gigs of RAM to my VM. Compiling gcc-4.6 and gccgo-4.7 took around an hour each, eglibc-2.15 took 1,5 hours.

After the compilation has finished go up one level ( cd .. ) and install all the .deb files

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

In case some packages fail, just run the command again.

Now repeat this whole process for the libgcc1 folder.
libc6 works mostly similar but needs to be patched manually

tar xvf eglibc_2.15.orig.tar.gz
mkdir ./eglibc-2.15/debian
zcat eglibc_2.15-0ubuntu10.15.diff.gz| patch -p0
chmod +x ./eglibc-2.15/debian/rules

then you can build & install it.

The (computationally) hard part is over, now you can build syslinux which will only take a couple of minutes.
Syslinux does not need to be compiled as a .deb but it's going to be needed later, to create the bootable usb drive.

dpkg-source -x syslinux_4.05+dfsg-2.dsc 
cd syslinux-4.05+dfsg
make

Congratulations, you've got your toolchain set up! Now you're ready for the 'fun' part:

Part 2 - Compiling the Kernel from scratch
https://groupdiy.com/index.php?topic=71385.msg943040#msg943040


references
https://www.infodrom.org/Debian/doc/maint/Maintenance-pkgbuild.html

 

[GreyboxAudio]

It's based on SGLinux, with BusyBox. Nothing special, not even really customised. They've just stripped out some unneeded utilities and a lot of drivers. Most notably, GPU and ethernet drivers. Probably to make sure it doesn't run on other hardware. It only recognises a limited number of Intel ethernet chipsets, fi.

It does, however, seem to detect if it's virtualised. A feeble attempt to make reverse engineering a bit harder?

SGLinux is a commercial Linux distro from Singapore. I suspect it might be an SELinux derivative. There's no website for it, atm. It used to be:

https://sglinux.com/

It is, or was developed by RMR Solutions:

http://www.rmr.com.sg/

It's built on the servers of Roll-your-own-Linux. Anybody can do that.

When I say it's nothing special, I mean the hardware isn't even up to the usual server specs. No redundancy, fi.

Unless you need it to run Waves plugins, I'd look elsewhere. None of the tech is exclusive.

Any suggestions how to get compatible kernel source files? sglinux is a dead end, as is Roll-your-own-Linux (which has become a generic term used about everywhere). According to Waves the download includes "our modifications to the Linux Kernel, along with libraries and some tools to get you into the code".

I can make out the libraries & tools part, but am completely lost when it comes to the kernel 

 

[cyrano]

Sorry man, no suggestions whatsoever. I gave up after reading about it. It's simply not built to be upgradeable/maintainable, but to fail after a few years. And of course, no intention of keeping it legal by publishing sources...

 

[Di_Sousa]

Hello everyone,
thanks for yous posts in this thread.

The open source version it's not really needed, first of all it's not complete and second the complete soundgrid server image is available in the soundgrid studio update softwares. search inside appdata folder.


I have the Soundgrid server image and I can send them to any of you, please pm me
It's pretty easy to build this

 

[Di_Sousa]

Sent the server image to a few members already, it needs to go into it's own partition in an hardrive.

also remember to check this discussion on the same subject:

https://www.reddit.com/r/livesound/comments/atvmr0/custom_soundgrid_server_a_work_in_progress/

 

[mhelin]

Don't have yet the hardware to try that out (it may work on any PC though). However, I was able to mount the image on Linux using a command:

sudo mkdir /mnt/sg
sudo mount -t msdos -o loop,offset=32256 SGS_9.7.img /mnt/sg

Then mounted the SGLinux initrd from /mnt/sg/boot to another tmp directory:

sudo mkdir /tmp/initrdmount
sudo mount -o loop /mnt/sg/boot/initrd /tmp/initrdmount

There you can find the whole SGLinux with the AG_NSServer in /usr/bin
I guess you are supposed to boot this from USB dongle or something, but this should be converted to larger image which allocates the whole dongle space like 4 GB. Don't know if you could run this on top of  Hyper-V or VirtualBox (just for testing).

 

[Eliani]

Hey Whoops,

I received that image from you and couldn't/wouldn't or just didn't admit straight away that I've known about this for a while now.
I've been using a DIY SoundGrid server for a couple of years now and use it regularly in the confined safety of my own studio, where crashes don't matter and on the road too...
it has never failed me...!!

This image you sent me, which is available within windows or Mac app data folders if you've got SoundGrid studio installed, contains the original firmware of a SGS server version 9.7
If you are moderately skilled with a computer you can find it and use it to make your own SGS server.

Waves is selling $500 of computer parts in a fancy enclosure for $2.900 or more, under the name Extreme server. There's enough information around on the web on how to build a computer and how to boot it from a USB stick and if you keep within the narrow compatibility specs of the waves SoundGrid server linux build you'll have a reliable SoundGrid server before you know it. For far less than you would spend on a server you can make one that will easily exceed the plugin benchmark count of an extreme server...

 

[Di_Sousa]

There's enough information around on the web on how to build a computer and how to boot it from a USB stick and if you keep within the narrow compatibility specs of the waves SoundGrid server linux build you'll have a reliable SoundGrid server before you know it. For far less than you would spend on a server you can make one that will easily exceed the plugin benchmark count of an extreme server...

Hi Eliani,
thanks for sharing, so is it as easy as copy the server image to an USB stick, make it bootable.
And then make the computer boot from the USB stick?

so the computer itself doesnt need any Hardrive , just the USB pen?

 

[Eliani]

it's as easy as writing the image to a USB-stick using your favorite image to disk writing software. The image is bootable by itself. It's a self-installing firmware version detecting the hardware and installing the appropriate partitions and boot sequence onto the USB-stick once booted from it... Waves use USB DOM sticks that fit the motherboard USB headers where normally you would stick a wire for off-board USB-ports in your case. If you don't know how to write the image to disk, have a look at a raspberry pi tutorial, the first step is to write to disk, second step boot from set stick, done...

now for compatibility, we should make a list with all setups that are proven to work. and that shouldn't be too hard because it has to be Intel for both CPU as NIC...

 

[GreyboxAudio]

Hey all,

thanks @whoops for sending me the image. I haven't had time to try it yet, but I also contacted the guy on reddit (kedwardsj) before and he sent me his image, which I got it up and running pretty easily.

Here's some notes about the whole process
- if you want to use SoundGrid Studio, you currently need to keep your Waves plugins at V9 or V10. V11 is not supported yet, but according to Waves we should see some update to SoundGrid Studio in Q2.
- If your ASIO/CoreAudio interface won't work with soundgrid connect, make sure the correct Soundgrid drivers are installed. The installers are located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Waves\SoundGrid\Utilities on Windows. If you have a WavesSoundGridDriverSetup.exe and a WavesSoundGridDriverSetupV11.exe in there, make sure to re-run the non V11 driver setup and reboot your system
- there are different server firmwares for V9/V10 and V11. This means you can either use SuperRack / eMotion LV1 (v11) or SoundGrid Studio / eMotion LV1 (v10). Switching between V9/V10 and a V11 environment requires reinstalling the correct drivers and up/downgrading the firmware on your server (which can easily be done from the SoundGrid application of your choice)

About Hardware
- according to the hardware specs on the Waves website, the Mainboards in the current servers are either GA-B150N-GSM or GA-B360N-GSM v1.0 from gigabyte
- the onboard NIC has to be Intel
- CPUs are Intel Skylake (on B150) or Coffee Lake (on B360). The recently announced server revisions will run on Coffee Lake Refresh CPUs (and I'm guessing they'll use the B360N board, too)

I've been trying the modified WSG image I got on reddit on the following hardware:
- Gigabyte Z370P D3 + Core i5 9600k = success 
- HP Z240 workstation (Intel PCH C236 chipset? Intel I1219lm NIC) + Core i7 6700 = success 
- MSI B450M Mortar Max + Ryzen 3 1200 = nope 
- MSI 790FX-GD70 + Phenom II X4 965 = nope 

 

[Di_Sousa]

now for compatibility, we should make a list with all setups that are proven to work. and that shouldn't be too hard because it has to be Intel for both CPU as NIC...

No need for it, list is too long, as I wrote beofre:

For hardware you can use any i5 or i7 processor,
the ethernet/network card has to be a Gigabit intel card.

 

[Eliani]

So what with the proton server? That's a celeron...

 

[Eliani]

- if you want to use SoundGrid Studio, you currently need to keep your Waves plugins at V9 or V10. V11 is not supported yet.

If you own V11 you can use v10 or v9 too, if they exist.
You need to use the offline installer to downgrade

By the way, my Asus Prime H310i-plus with Realtec 8111H Gigabit LAN controller works fine too... 
intel i5 8600K 16GB ram

 

[GreyboxAudio]

If you own V11 you can use v10 or v9 too, if they exist.
You need to use the offline installer to downgrade

By the way, my Asus Prime H310i-plus with Realtec 8111H Gigabit LAN controller works fine too... 
intel i5 8600K 16GB ram

What image are you using? I've got an Asus H81M here and I'm having issues with the Realtek 8111G that's on board. Although it should work, because the previous generation Waves servers used mostly H81 chipsets & realtek 8111 NICs, my image is loading the wrong driver 

 

[GreyboxAudio]

just a quick update:
I have successfully managed to compile the Soundgrid-kernel from scratch.

 

[Eliani]

just a quick update:
I have successfully managed to compile the Soundgrid-kernel from scratch.

That's insane, I commend you for doing that, I'm sure you're real proud... I would if I was able to, I made it real far, but had to admit that it was easyer to just take it where Waves so fulishly planted it...

I'm using a stock firmware, usb created from the V9.7 image inside the SG software and Whoops's image too, upgrade to V11 worked perfectly...