Re: Updated Debian Ports installation images 2025-03-31 / loongarch test report
On Wednesday, April 23, 2025 6:49:39 AM Coordinated Universal Time you wrote:
> Hello Yifei,
>
> thanks a lot for the detailed feedback! This is very useful.
Glad to know! I intend to put some notes on wiki and send out a proper
installation report once I got time.
>
> On Tue, 2025-04-22 at 23:05 +0000, Yifei Zhan wrote:
> > Yes, I'm aware of that UEFI issue and my firmware is updated to beta10
> > which is the latest one listed on [1]
> >
> > It eventually got it working by manually running the EFI file from the
> > UEFI
> > Shell, the process is roughly:
> >
> > - boot into firmware, select Boot Manager -> UEFI Shell -> spam ESC to
> > skip
> > startup.nsh
> >
> > - find the FS entry ending with USB(XXX)/CDROM(XXX), for me that's fs2,
> > then manually load grub:
> >
> > shell> fs2:
> > shell> cd efi
> > shell> cd boot
> > shell> bootloongarch64.efi
>
> I hope that Loongson fixes this issue in the near future. Using these
> filenames works on all other UEFI targets we have, including the emulated
> LoongArch machine in QEMU.
I believe this issue is tracked by loongson here:
https://github.com/loongson/Firmware/issues/133
Interestingly the EFI directory when inspected under Linux appeared to be
named in uppercase but it's shown in lowercase under the UEFI shell, I'm not
sure why or if this is the cause of the problem.
> > - select 'install', 'graphical install' won't work due to the missing
> >
> > /install/gtk/initrd.gz
>
> Since loong64 is still part of Debian Ports, there are limitations with
> regards what's available in debian-installer. I have never tried building
> an installer image with the graphical installer, I would have to try that
> first.
> > At one stage of the installation I was prompted about missing firmware for
> > USB controller, then the USB drive is disconnected, I have to unplug and
> > replug it then manually remount it as /cdrom. But other than that, the
> > whole process is smoother than anticipated!
>
> Firmware is also only available for Debian release architectures which means
> that this issue will be resolved when loong64 becomes an official
> architecture.
Is the progress tracked somewhere? I'd like to see Loong64 becoming an official
release architecture in Forky and I'm happy to help with that.
> > I installed KDE Plasma and although sddm/lightdm won't work (due to
> > missing
> > graphic card?), running startx from the console does the trick. I also
> > have to disable acceleration in about:config for firefox to display any
> > webpage, but other than that the system is usable as a desktop.
>
> Both sddm and lightdm should work just fine. Did you install any desktop
> using the tasksel command? This should install all the necessary packages.
>
Yes, I installed KDE plasma when prompted during the installation process it
comes with sddm, however it does not work, so I manually installed lightdm
which also doesn't work. The system reports the graphic adapter as being LLVM
pipe, so I assume either my board doesn't support graphic acceleration, or a
discrete graphic card is expected.
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