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