Unraid OS 6.9.0-Beta22 Now Available

Welcome (again) to the 6.9 release development!

The reason that we still mark this as a beta is because we'd like to get wider testing of the new multiple-pool feature, as well as perhaps sneak in a couple more refinements. With that in mind, the obligatory disclaimer:

Important: Beta code is not fully tested and not feature-complete. We recommend running on test servers only!

With that out of the way, let's see what's new in this release:

Multiple Pools

This new feature permits you to define up to 35 named pools, of up to 30 storage devices/pool. The current "cache pool" is now simply a pool named "cache". Pools are created and managed via the Main page.

Note: When you upgrade a server which has a cache pool defined, a backup of config/disk.cfg will be saved to config/disk.cfg.bak, and then cache device assignment settings are moved out of disk.cfg and into a new file, config/pools/cache.cfg. If later you revert back to a pre-6.9 Unraid OS release you will lose your cache device assignments and you will have to manually re-assign devices to cache. As long as you reassign the correct devices, data should remain intact.

When you create a user share, or edit an existing user share, you can specify which pool should be associated with that share. The assigned pool functions identically to current cache pool operation.

As with the current "cache pool", a single-device pool may be formatted with either xfs, btrfs, or reiserfs. A multiple-device pool may only be formatted with btrfs. A future release will include support for multiple "Unraid array" pools. We are also considering zfs support.

Multi-Language Support

Another exciting new feature in Unraid 6.9 is the ability to download language packs and use the Unraid OS in a number of different languages. Currently, English, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, simplified Chinese and Portuguese are available and several others are in the works.

A huge amount of work and effort has been implemented by @bonienl to provide multiple-language support in the Unraid OS webGUI. Likewise, thanks to @Squid, language packs are installed via the Community Applications plugin - look for a new "Language" Category or you can also search for specific language packs. 

For more info on Multi-Language Support, please check out our guide here.

Note: Community Applications HAS to be up to date to install languages. Versions of CA prior to 2020.05.12 will not even load on this release. As of this writing, the current version of CA is 2020.06.13a. See also here.

Each language pack exists in public Unraid organization github repos. Interested users are encouraged to clone and issue Pull Requests to correct translations errors. Language translations and PR merging is managed by @SpencerJ.

Also, a new Multi-Language Section of the Unraid forum is available for discussions in language specific forums.

Other Updates

• Linux Kernel upgraded to 5.7.
• Base Packages all updated to latest versions. In addition, Linux PAM has been integrated. This will permit us to install 2-factor authentication packages in a future release.
• Docker updated to version 19.03.11
• libvirt updated to version 6.4.0
• qemu updated to version 5.0.0
• VFIO-PCI Config plugin is now built-in to Unraid OS 6.9.