[Arm-dev] Gigabyte MP30-AR0

[Jeremiah Rothschild]

On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 08:02:40PM +0000, Gordan Bobic wrote:
> On 11/03/16 17:56, Jeremiah Rothschild wrote:
> >On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 05:03:46PM +0000, Michael Howard wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>On 11/03/2016 16:45, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> >>>On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 10:31:20AM +0000, Michael Howard wrote:
> >>>>5 seconds only to be precise, at least on my board :)
> >>>I found TFTP to be slower and more unreliable than that.  However my
> >>>TFTP server is dnsmasq running on an old box,
> >>
> >>That could be the reason then. Sdcards are painfully slow so you get
> >>what you pay for metaphorically speaking. No big deal either way I
> >>guess but I much prefer tftp here on a completely 1Gb network and a
> >>tftp server on a 24/7 Xenserver VM.
> >
> >Both methods are a little unorthodox - at least in my experience.
> 
> In the ARM world, booting the kernel straight out of u-boot is the
> norm. It is how the boot process works on the vast majority of ARM
> devices. It is loading UEFI at all that is unorthodox. UEFI and BIOS
> before it are very much x86-isms.

To clarify, it's the SD/TFTP booting that I find unorthodox for a
functional, disk having server. I know there are many use cases but,
personally, as a sys admin, I'd typically only go down that route for
operations like kickstart, rescue, etc.

> >Is there
> >a spinning disk based solution perhaps, too? I would imagine the chain
> >could be loaded from any storage resource. Can it be hacked onto an extra
> >OS drive partition or something?
> 
> UEFI requires a FAT partition anyway that you could also use for
> this.

Nod. I do have the /boot/efi partition. Further leveraging it, or another
partition, would be sweet.

> The main question is whether u-boot that ships with this board
> actually supports SATA. If it does it would be trivially easy to
> make that work. Ask me again in 48 hours and I'll be able to tell
> you whether that works on this particular Gigabyte board. :)

Interesting. I'm new to U-Boot but it never occurred to me that it wouldn't
detect all of my devices. That said, I have 2x SSD's in here yet:

MP30AR0# scsi info
SCSI dev. 0:  device type unknown
SCSI dev. 1:  device type unknown
SCSI dev. 2:  device type unknown
SCSI dev. 3:  device type unknown
SCSI dev. 4:  device type unknown
SCSI dev. 5:  device type unknown

> Gordan
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