Bug#975327: installation-reports: debian installer bullseye alpha 2 fails to boot on lenovo miix 630 (arm64)
Package: installation-reports
Severity: important
Dear Maintainer,
I tried to install Debian Testing on Lenovo Miix 630 (arm64, snapdragon 835) using the Debian Installer Bullseye Alpha 2.
The installer does not boot at all, giving a black screen instead.
I believe this the problem with the UEFI firmware of the Miix 630, as described here
https://www.linaro.org/blog/porting-linux-to-aarch64-laptops/
"
The beginning of the project saw us gather together a bunch of laptops based on the Snapdragon 835. Which, in no particular (okay, maybe
alphabetical) order were; ASUS NovaGo TP370QL, HP Envy x2 and Lenovo Mixx 630. The laptops implement UEFI support so we disabled Secure
Boot, inserted a bootable SD card containing Grub for AArch64 and … nothing. No error message. Not a sausage! Just a black screen.
Thankfully, after a long period of head scratching some bright soul discovered that a bug in the firmware requires the bootable binary, Grub
in this case, to be compiled 4k aligned for the firmware to take any notice of it. What we saw (or were not seeing) was UEFI Boot Services
rejecting Grub as a viable binary.
"
The version of grub used in the installer -- 2.04-4 (I am a bit uncertain about the -4 here) -- has been patched to fix this issue.
However I believe the debian version of the grub somehow disables that fix (I was not able to identify the exact patch that does that).
Recompiling vanilla grub 2.04 without the debian patches and replacing the debian installer grub binary allowed a boot into the grub shell
(for some reason I was not able to make the vanilla grub read the grub.cfg correctly).
Please diregard the system information below -- this is just the system I am submitting the bugreport from. The architecture is the same,
thoug - arm64 (aarch64)
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 10.6
APT prefers stable-updates
APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: arm64 (aarch64)
Foreign Architectures: armhf
Kernel: Linux 5.8.16-sunxi64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_WARN, TAINT_CRAP
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
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