[Arm-dev] Gigabyte MP30-AR0

Mon Feb 22 15:30:09 UTC 2016
Michael Howard <mike at dewberryfields.co.uk>

On 22/02/2016 14:42, Gordan Bobic wrote:
> On 2016-02-22 14:26, Michael Howard wrote:
>> On 22/02/2016 11:50, Gordan Bobic wrote:
>>> It seems a little odd that the installer would put the kernel somewhere
>>> other than the target installation disk. Having UEFI on-board I can
>>> understand, but shouldn't the boot sequence in this case be:
>>>
>>> 1) u-boot (on-board)
>>> 2) UEFI (wherever u-boot can fetch it from)
>>> 3) grub (off the UEFI FAT partition on the target disk)
>>> 4) Kernel (/boot partition)
>>>
>>> Is there a good reason for deviating from this?
>>>
>>
>> Ok, reinstalling the original u-boot resolves the onboard kernel
>> issue, that is, the board now boots to OpenLinux  again when no other
>> devices are attached.  So the 'Applied Micro Linux 3.12.0 (aarch64)'
>> kernel is part of their (Gigabyte's) u-boot image.
>
> Right, so now that UEFI is working, it seems the next thing to do
> is to get grub2 loading from UEFI. From there on it should be
> trivial to get a sensible kernel booting.
>

Ok, some strangeness happening here. It seems it wasn't the centos 
installer that caused the issue of the board not booting to OpenLinux 
afterall. Having reinstalled u-boot and confirmed the board booted to 
OpenLinux, I chainloaded UEFI once more (using the instructions from 
Phong Vo) in order to try manually booting centos. I couldn't 
immediately see how to do that so I reset the board and now back to non 
booting board. Go figure.

> I do find it baffling that the installer that requires UEFI would
> do something so fundamentally different in terms of configuring
> the boot process compared to the x86 method of doing it.
>

I guess it doesn't afterall.

> Hmm... I wonder... Did you create a 250MB FAT partition on the
> disk of type EF00 (GPT), for the UEFI boot loader part (the
> stuff that ends up in /boot/efi)?

Well, this installer is completely new to me. At the opening screen of 
the text install I had to select various aspects of the install before 
it would let me proceed. One of which is the selection of the install 
disc and how it should be partitioned. I changed from LVM to basic 
partitioning and an efi partition was reported to have been created. 
Once the install began, there was no requirement for further user 
interaction.

-- 
Mike Howard