[Arm-dev] Gigabyte MP30-AR0

[Gordan Bobic]

On 11/03/16 22:51, Jeremiah Rothschild wrote:
> 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

6 devices? There are only 4 SATA connectors on the motherboard. I 
connected a single SATA device (just a normal 250GB SATA disk) and it 
seems to have detected that fine, and can read partitions and ext4 
contents (ext4ls scsi 0:1) from it.

I'm just downloading the Centos 7.2 aarch64 ISO, so more in a bit.

Gordan