debian installer on arm64

[Thorsten Alteholz]

Hi,

after getting my Macchiatobin, I naively thought that I only had to copy
the arm64 installer from [1] or an netinst image to an USB stick and I
could start with the fun.
Unfortunately that did not work. So is the whole thing not that easy as
written on [2] and do I really have to build everything from scratch like
recommended in the Macchiatobin-wiki?

Thanks for any help
Thorsten

[1] https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/arm64/
[2] https://wiki.debian.org/Arm64Port

[Steve McIntyre]

Hi,
after getting my Macchiatobin, I naively thought that I only had to copy the
arm64 installer from [1] or an netinst image to an USB stick and I could
start with the fun.
Unfortunately that did not work. So is the whole thing not that easy as
written on [2] and do I really have to build everything from scratch like
recommended in the Macchiatobin-wiki?

No, not at all. Unfortunately, the Macchiatobin still ships with
U-Boot installed as the default firmware and it's not all that useful
for installation. The better way to use the machine is to write an
EDK2 (UEFI) image to a uSD card and boot using that. There are some
switch settings documented in the solid-run docs [3] to tell the
machine to boot off uSD instead of the SPI flash.

The EDK2 image I've used is one built by my friend Leif (unixsmurf on
IRC) [4], and it works reasonably well. Using that, the system should
happily boot Debian from a USB stick and it should let you install and
run. Once you've installed, *for now* you'll need to use the rescue
mode option to install grub to the removable media path, as we don't
yet have support for storing UEFI boot variables.

We're not *quite* there for an "everything works" system, but we're
not too far away. There's occasional discussion on #debian-arm, and
I'm hosting a (quiet-ish) mailing list for macchiatobin discussion
[5].

HTH!

[1] https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/arm64/
[2] https://wiki.debian.org/Arm64Port

[3] https://wiki.solid-run.com/doku.php?id=products:a8040:communityboard:dipswitch
[4] http://eciton.net/~leif/macchiatobin/flash-image-17.10.bin
[5] https://lists.einval.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/macchiato

[Thorsten Alteholz]

Hi Steve,

Post by Steve McIntyre
No, not at all. Unfortunately, the Macchiatobin still ships with
U-Boot installed as the default firmware and it's not all that useful
for installation.

am I right that this U-Boot stumbles over partition id 0xef of the second
partition of the installer iso?

Post by Steve McIntyre
The EDK2 image I've used is one built by my friend Leif (unixsmurf on
IRC) [4], and it works reasonably well. Using that, the system should
happily boot Debian from a USB stick and it should let you install and
run.

Great, thanks a lot! The installer does start now. Unfortunately I get:

[2018-01-12 19:12:51
Press ESCAPE for boot options ...[Bds]Booting UEFI BUFFALO USB Flash Disk A300000000633130
[2018-01-12 19:18:01
XhcBulkTransfer: error - Time out, transfer - 40
[2018-01-12 19:23:07
XhcBulkTransfer: error - Time out, transfer - 40
[2018-01-12 19:28:13
XhcBulkTransfer: error - Time out, transfer - 40
UsbBotExecCommand: UsbBotGetStatus (Time out)
UsbBootExecCmd: Timeout to Exec 0x0 Cmd

but after that 16 minute timeout period it goes:

Loading driver at 0x000B668E000 EntryPoint=0x000B668E400
[2018-01-12 19:28:14
Loading driver at 0x000B668E000 EntryPoint=0x000B668E400
GNU GRUB version 2.02~beta3-5
(...)

and the installer is available. Do you have any idea why it needs to wait?

Thorsten

[Steve McIntyre]

Post by Thorsten Alteholz
Hi Steve,

Post by Steve McIntyre
No, not at all. Unfortunately, the Macchiatobin still ships with
U-Boot installed as the default firmware and it's not all that useful
for installation.

am I right that this U-Boot stumbles over partition id 0xef of the second
partition of the installer iso?

?? Not sure what you mean...

Post by Thorsten Alteholz

Post by Steve McIntyre
The EDK2 image I've used is one built by my friend Leif (unixsmurf on
IRC) [4], and it works reasonably well. Using that, the system should
happily boot Debian from a USB stick and it should let you install and
run.

[2018-01-12 19:12:51
Press ESCAPE for boot options ...[Bds]Booting UEFI BUFFALO USB Flash Disk A300000000633130
[2018-01-12 19:18:01
XhcBulkTransfer: error - Time out, transfer - 40
[2018-01-12 19:23:07
XhcBulkTransfer: error - Time out, transfer - 40
[2018-01-12 19:28:13
XhcBulkTransfer: error - Time out, transfer - 40
UsbBotExecCommand: UsbBotGetStatus (Time out)
UsbBootExecCmd: Timeout to Exec 0x0 Cmd
Loading driver at 0x000B668E000 EntryPoint=0x000B668E400
[2018-01-12 19:28:14
Loading driver at 0x000B668E000 EntryPoint=0x000B668E400
GNU GRUB version 2.02~beta3-5
(...)
and the installer is available. Do you have any idea why it needs to wait?

Sorry, no. How old/used is the USB drive?

[Thorsten Alteholz]

Hi Steve,

Post by Steve McIntyre

Post by Thorsten Alteholz
am I right that this U-Boot stumbles over partition id 0xef of the second
partition of the installer iso?

?? Not sure what you mean...

the iso images of the netinst arm64 debian installer have two partitions,
one of type 83 (= Linux) and one of type ef (= EFI (FAT-12/16/32)). The
U-Boot in the Macchiatobin SPI flash can access files on partitions of
type 83 and 6 with ext4load and fatload. So I assume that it just stumbles
over the efi partition due to a simple id mismatch. If this is the case
one could directly start from the usb debian installer without first
having to boot the EDK2 image from the sd card.
Does that make sense to you?

Post by Steve McIntyre
Sorry, no. How old/used is the USB drive?

Oh, this USB stick is rather old. A different one doesn't boot at all, but
an USB3 SD card reader seems to work now.

Thorsten

[Steve McIntyre]

Post by Thorsten Alteholz
Hi Steve,

Post by Steve McIntyre

Post by Thorsten Alteholz
am I right that this U-Boot stumbles over partition id 0xef of the second
partition of the installer iso?

?? Not sure what you mean...

the iso images of the netinst arm64 debian installer have two partitions, one
of type 83 (= Linux) and one of type ef (= EFI (FAT-12/16/32)). The U-Boot in
the Macchiatobin SPI flash can access files on partitions of type 83 and 6
with ext4load and fatload. So I assume that it just stumbles over the efi
partition due to a simple id mismatch. If this is the case one could directly
start from the usb debian installer without first having to boot the EDK2
image from the sd card.
Does that make sense to you?

Ah, I see. I didn't realise that the included U-Boot was so
... awkward. I know people are working on some limited UEFI support in
U-Boot, which (eventually!) might mean this kind of thing will get
much easier. I just went straight for the EDK2 image for my machine.

Post by Thorsten Alteholz

Post by Steve McIntyre
Sorry, no. How old/used is the USB drive?

Oh, this USB stick is rather old. A different one doesn't boot at all, but an
USB3 SD card reader seems to work now.

Yay!