[Arm-dev] Gigabyte MP30-AR0

[Phong Vo]

This board has a VGA component belonging to the AST2400 BMC (but
connected to the SoC PCIe).  VGA console should be working fine with
the installer up to Linux.
Graphical interface is working but would require a little fix to the
xorg mode setting driver to correctly detect the PCI ID of the VGA
device.  Talking about this, which path should we take to get this fix
to the Xorg driver?

-Phong

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 11:02 PM, Jon Masters <jonathan at jonmasters.org> wrote:
> You'll be able to get a graphical interface on some cards that don't require POSTing by the EFI "BIOS". Cards that do require this (eg on x86) contain EFI ROM code compiled for x86 that won't be run on ARM (this is being fixed). But the Tianocore on that board isn't setup to do a graphical console anyway even if that works. So this is why you won't get graphics until after boot when the installer starts - if you have a card that can self-initialize. That's many modern ones but not always "some random play card I had left lying around" that folks often use when testing.
>
> Marcin in the Fedora community has many good points on his blog around cards he has tested.
>
> Jon.
>
> --
> Computer Architect | Sent from my 64-bit #ARM Powered phone
>
>> On Feb 23, 2016, at 07:11, Gordan Bobic <gordan at redsleeve.org> wrote:
>>
>>> On 2016-02-23 12:07, Michael Howard wrote:
>>>> On 23/02/2016 11:53, Gordan Bobic wrote:
>>>>> On 2016-02-23 11:47, Michael Howard wrote:
>>>>>> On 22/02/2016 20:08, Gordan Bobic wrote:
>>>>>>> On 2016-02-22 17:29, Michael Howard wrote:
>>>>>>>> On 22/02/2016 17:04, Gordan Bobic wrote:
>>>>>>>>> On 2016-02-22 16:57, Michael Howard wrote:
>>>>>>>>> On 22/02/2016 16:47, Gordan Bobic wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>> Anyway, the install does in fact succeed, which is great. I probably
>>>>>>>>>>> should have stuck with the LVM partitioning scheme but hey ho, I can
>>>>>>>>>>> re run things now that I know UEFI is working.
>>>>>>>>>>> So, I have a minimal CentOS install with 4.2.0-0.21.el7.aarch64
>>>>>>>>>>> kernel. Great start, thanks to all.
>>>>>>>>>>> There is no networking so I need to get the installer to recognise the
>>>>>>>>>>> nics at install time.
>>>>>>>>>> So installer produces a bootable system, complete with a working kernel?
>>>>>>>>> Yes, and no. It produces a bootable kernel.
>>>>>>>> Right, but how does that kernel get booted?
>>>>>>>> u-boot -> kernel ?
>>>>>>>> u-boot -> UEFI -> kernel ?
>>>>>>>> u-boot -> UEFI -> grub2 -> kernel ?
>>>>>>>>>> Does it use grub2 or does it do some magic to boot the kernel straight
>>>>>>>>>> from UEFI?
>>>>>>>>> I haven't had the nerve to attempt to bun UEFI to SPI-NOR permanently,
>>>>>>>> Oh, I wasn't suggesting that. I cannot think of a good reason to burn
>>>>>>>> UEFI into SPI-NOR vs. chain-loading it from u-boot, since the boot
>>>>>>>> cascade is automatable.
>>>>>>>>> so following the install (and any subsequent ones) I've loaded it from
>>>>>>>>> u-boot manually and then booted directly from UEFI from there. I can
>>>>>>>>> of course automate that I suppose.
>>>>>>>> Right, so post-install the boot process is:
>>>>>>>> u-boot -> UEFI -> kernel ?
>>>>>>> Yes.
>>>>>> Sweet! Now I just have to try to scrape together enough to get
>>>>>> me one of those cometh pay day. :-D
>>>>>>>> No grub2 involved?
>>>>>>> No.
>>>>>> I'll see if I can do something about that when mine arrives. It
>>>>>> would be nice to have it working the same way x86 UEFI works.
>>>>> With my pre-occupation with having no networking, I gave you some bum
>>>>> info.
>>>> Oh... No NIC driver? Or something else missing?
>>> No, not a driver issue. On my first install the installer just
>>> wouldn't accept that the nic(s) were indeed connected. After the
>>> install the  system recognised that eth0, eth1 & eth2 existed but they
>>> each had a hardware address of ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff and no ip address. To
>>> resolve that I needed to set the hardware addresses in UEFI and they
>>> then shone through. They were correctly set in u-boot.
>>> The installer still wouldn't accept the nic(s) were connected even
>>> when set in UEFI. I could assign an ip using the installer shell on
>>> [F2] but by then the installer had given up on vnc.
>>
>> No VGA framebuffer support gets detected by the installer?
>>
>>> In the end, I
>>> edited the grub command line and appended ip, netmask, gateway and
>>> vnc, after which I got a gui install over vnc. Don't yet know if X11
>>> works on the installed system, I haven't tried.
>>
>> I see, so is the installer running over serial console or VGA/USB console?
>>
>> Gordan
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