Re: Debian Bookworm+ on Cavium ThunderX?
On Wed, Apr 17, 2024 at 04:37:50PM +0200, Steffen Grunewald wrote:
> On Mon, 2024-04-15 at 14:55:06 +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> > On Fri, 2024-04-12 at 09:28 +0200, Steffen Grunewald wrote:
> >
> > > Any attempt to boot a Bullseye (5.x) or Bookworm kernel (6.x) resulted in
> > > an early kernel panic.
> >
> > Try the latest sid kernel (6.7.9) and the latest upstream too.
>
> Doing so the Debian way would require a major upgrade of the related tools
> (most notably, gcc), also to build some initrd - something I'd like to avoid
> on the only system with that kind of hardware I have.
>
> I'll go for some live distros first since I cannot fully exclude "just a
> missing kernel parameter", and Ubuntu 23.10 seems to be the newest I can
> get hold of. Previous attempts used PXE boot, so kernel parameters might
> be something to look for first.
>
> This
> > sounds like something that will need a git bisect to figure out though.
> > https://wiki.debian.org/DebianKernel/GitBisect
>
> That's the really time-consuming part...
> I'm kind of surprised that nobody else seems to use this hardware platform?
Back when I had a user for such machines, no one would sell you one unless
you were a large cloud provider. Then I changed jobs and no longer have
any need for it, but at least it seems there is some option to buy them
these days.
Did you check if it has a /boot/config file for the working kernel that
you could compare to see if there were any interesting options it had
enabled that the current debian kernel doesn't?
Of course if support for the CPU was never merged to the mainline kernel,
then you are probably out of luck.
I do see
/usr/lib/linux-image-6.1.0-0.deb11.13-arm64/cavium/thunder-88xx.dtb in
the kernel package, so at least that is promising. Is the machine using
UEFI or some custom boot method? I see dtb files in the "BIOS" update,
so I am guessing it isn't UEFI.
It certainly looks like one of the weirder designs, and gigabyte seems
to have stuppod any support 5 years ago.
--
Len Sorensen
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