Gigabyte MP30-AR1
Dear Experts,
I've splashed out and bought myself a Gigabyte MP30-AR1. This is
a "server" board with an Applied Micro X-Gene processor.
There are various reports of people installing distributions including
Debian on the previous MP30-AR0. The difference between the -AR0 and
the -AR1 is that mine ships with UEFI, while the earlier board shipped
with U-Boot. I think that apart from that the boards are identical.
So far my attempts at installing Debian have not been successful.
I have, however, managed to install CentOS! So there is hope. In
each case I've put an ISO image onto a flash drive; UEFI has detected
this and presented it in its boot menu. Then GRUB runs successfully,
but it seems to fail to start the installer's kernel; with the current
strech/sid installer mini.iso
(http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/sid/main/installer-arm64/current/images/netboot/mini.iso)
I get:
EFI stub: Booting Linux Kernel...
ConvertPages: Incompatible memory types
EFI stub: EFI_RNG_PROTOCOL unavailable, no randomness supplied
EFI stub: Using DTB from configuration table
EFI stub: Exiting boot services and installing virtual address map...
OSBootEvent = Success
L3c Cache: 8MB
One possibility is that I just need to supply a suitable console=
argument to the installer kernel command line; this seemed to help in
some of the -AR0 installation reports. I've tried various things but
none of them help. Maybe I just don't know what the installer kernel
thinks the serial port is called.
Another thought is related to device tree blobs. I see that the ISO
image contains DTBs for various boards, including the X-Gene Mustang,
but not for this board. How are device trees supposed to work with
UEFI? Does the ISO image have to provide it?
Or perhaps there is something else I've overlooked. What do you suggest?
(Where do the experts on X-Gene and UEFI etc. hang out?) Perhaps it
would be easiest to debootstrap from CentOS!
Cheers, Phil.
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