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Bug#770231: Amd64-efi installer becomes unresponsive on x86 bios



On Tue, 2014-11-25 at 20:06 -0500, Samuel Comeau wrote:
> On November 25, 2014 11:10:06 AM Ian Campbell wrote:
> > On Mon, 2014-11-24 at 16:26 -0500, Samuel Comeau wrote:
> > > Hello Ian,
> > > 
> > > 
> > > Well, it appears I have made a mistake about the type of processor
> > > that's in here : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz.
> > 
> > I think the P4 had 64-bit support in some variants, but it does sound
> > likely that yours isn't one of them.
> > 
> > >  I don't have the text of the menu screen for you yet, I would have to
> > > 
> > > retry installing linux, which I haven't had the time to do yet. I can
> > > at least tell you, however, that the menu I got to was very similar to
> > > this one
> > > http://debian-handbook.info/browse/stable/images/inst-boot.png ,
> > 
> > OK thanks for clarifying, so you are failing at the bootloader screen
> > and not making it to the installer proper.
> > 
> > Given that I think what Steve said regarding not booting amd64 kernels
> > on i386 hardware is probably the most likely theory. I'm not sure why
> > the message about incompatible arch should be AWOL, perhaps related to
> > the bootloader having enabled graphical mode?
> > 
> > Does an i386 image work on your system?
> 
> In fact, I do have an i386 image on my system, and some of the messages I 
> posted about this bug were written from that same system, like the one with 
> the linked picture.

OK, good, that's expected.

In $subject you mention EFI. Is this old system really EFI based?

Anyway, I finally got around to downloading:
http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/bt-cd/debian-7.7.0-amd64-CD-1.iso.torrent
and booted with:
        qemu-system-i386 -M isapc -cdrom debian-7.7.0-amd64-CD-1.iso
and I get a hang after selecting "Install" from the bootloader menu.

They I downloaded this:
http://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/amd64/20141130-00:21/netboot/mini.iso
and booted with:
        qemu-system-i386 -M isapc -cdrom mini.iso
and it reported as expected:
        This kernel requires an x86-64 CPU, but only detected an i486
        CPU.
    Unable to boot - please use a kernel appropriate for your CPU.

Aha! If I remove the "quiet" from the kernel command line with
debian-7.7.0-amd64-CD-1.iso (press TAB on the entry instead of ENTER,
edit, then hit ENTER) then I see the message with Wheezy too, so the bug
seems to be that quiet is suppressing a useful error message as well as
the usual noise.

I can't see a commit in Linux which obviously fixes it, but there are
lots in that range even just over arch/x86/boot and some of them are
rather non-obvious after a quick peek, there's some stuff refactoring
debug and quiet mode output handling, I'd bet it was in that somewhere.

If not then I think mystery is resolved and Jessie is fixed, so I won't
plan to spend any longer investigating.

Ian.


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