[Macchiato] Trying to install mainline debian 9

[Duncan Guthrie]

Hello,

On 17/09/2018 16:20, Riku Voipio wrote:
> On Fri, 14 Sep 2018 at 16:19, Andrew Elwell <andrew.elwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, 6 Sep 2018 at 06:53, Jeremy Linton <jeremy.linton at arm.com> wrote:
>>> Putting the UEFI image on SD, I can successfully boot the fedora
>>> installer from USB (rawhide/f29, haven't tried PXE) and the resulting
>>> installed image can also boot from SATA. It still has a few warts (ACPI
>>> for one) but, I imagine that a fairly recent opensuse/debian should at
>>> least boot.
>>
>> Thanks - that indeed works. I managed to get a debian installer
>> working OK off USB.
>>
>> Thats the good news,
>> The Bad news is that there's no mvpp2 driver for the default 4.9 arm
>> kernels, Backports has a 4.17 kernel which looks better:
>>
>> root at debian:/lib/modules# ls
>> 4.17.0-0.bpo.3-arm64  4.9.0-7-arm64  4.9.0-8-arm64
>> root at debian:/lib/modules# find . -name mvpp2.ko
>> ./4.17.0-0.bpo.3-arm64/kernel/drivers/net/ethernet/marvell/mvpp2.ko
>> root at debian:/lib/modules#
>>
>> but if I try and boot that, all I see on the console is
>>
>> Loading Linux 4.17.0-0.bpo.3-arm64 ...
>> Loading initial ramdisk ...
>> EFI stub: Booting Linux Kernel...
>> EFI stub: Using DTB from configuration table
>> EFI stub: Exiting boot services and installing virtual address map...
>>
>> and nothing else happens.
>>
>> Even adding earlyprintk and friends didn't reveal any more.
> 
> earlyprintk is long gone. Use "earlycon" instead. Also in grub remove
> "quiet" and replace with "debug"
> 
> Try adding "clk_ignore_unused" to tell the kernel not to shut down
> unused clocks, if the kernel just hangs mysteriously in the boot.
> 
> Riku
> 
>> Any suggestions?
>>
>> (using a USB ethernet dongle longterm kinda defeats the purpose of the
>> macchiatobin)
>>
>> Many thanks
>>
>> Andrew

I'm having significant trouble booting anything. Each thing I've tried
appears to have similar issues and I'm wanting to rule out issues with
my UEFI build before anything.

My UEFI is written to internal SPI flash, as my board has significant
issues booting from directly from SD card (which I've contacted SolidRun
about) - for an identical, sample error message, see the following
forum: https://macchiatobin.net/forums/topic/sbsa-support/#post-470

This should not pose an issue updating the UEFI, as I can use an SPI
programmer and the pin header. But, I am reluctant to do so.

I've tried:

* debian-buster-DI-alpha3-arm64-netinst.iso.

This works best of everything, albeit Grub installation just hangs, and
there's no way to get logs as I can't change to a TTY from my serial
adaptor.

This image appears to use the 4.16.x kernel. Stretch installer doesn't
even work at all, seemingly.

* Debian mini.iso from 28/19/2018.

This just fails entirely. This appears to be a kernel panic, verbose log
here: https://paste.debian.net/hidden/4cd96c8c/. Similarly the latest
Ubuntu etc also fails, so it's not Debian-specific in this case, as far
as I can tell. I also had to set console=uart0 for anything of note to
appear (earlycon prints up to the console change to tty0, and the panic
happens after this). I confess I don't understand the kernel panic
message, but I hope it is useful to anyone reading.

* Fedora-Server-netinst-aarch64-28-1.1.iso

This doesn't panic; it uses a the 4.16.x kernel as before, which appears
to work somewhat.

Booting from USB (actual USB, or SD card plugged into USB card reader)
systemd-udevd says "watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#0 stuck for 22s!
[systemd-udevd:1288]" over and over again, locking it up. I can't even
get it to actually boot from SD card, as it just boots into a broken
Grub installation.

* Fedora-Everything-netinst-aarch64-Rawhide-20181028.n.0.iso

Uses 4.19.0-1.fc30.aarch64. So the kernel version itself isn't the issue
seemingly. It fails with some error with regards to being unable to load
modules from disk. I tried the same set of installation media as for the
Fedora 28 image.

--

With regards to the UEFI, I did attempt to install a new version.
Naturally, this means building the latest firmware. However the
instructions on the SolidRun website don't actually work. The step
"build -a AARCH64 -t GCC5 -b RELEASE -p
OpenPlatformPkg/Platforms/Marvell/Armada/Armada80x0McBin.dsc" fails with
the following error: https://paste.debian.net/hidden/27427375/.

I am not holding my breath waiting for a fix.

--

In fact, the only thing I ever managed to successfully boot on my
Macchiatobin has been OpenWRT. It worked really well, and was a very
polished port. But, with UEFI, we can't (easily) load the OpenWRT
images, and it wasn't suitable for my use-case.

Best wishes,
Duncan