MP30AR0-Installation

Intro

Author: Yu-Chiang Huang [email protected]

Installation

Requirements

• UEFI Bootloader
• Console Wire
• Installation ISO, just pick up one:
  • CentOS 7 AArch64
  • Fedora 23 AArch64

Prepare

UEFI Bootloader

Here is a tutorial about flashing UEFI bootloader.

Also, remember to set MAC address in UEFI shell.

i.e.

set MAC0 aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:01
set MAC1 aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:02

Installation ISO

Choosing an installation media is a big deal. The media should be supported by the kernel. For example, consider the following tragedy senario, we have a USB stick shipped a fabulous Linux distro. Then we plug it into our board and UEFI reconizes it, great! So we boot our USB instantly. The kernel is loaded into memory and... none of filesystem mounted, because of lack of USB driver.

It seems that there is lack of USB drive in some older Linux distro aarch64 installation ISO. (Maybe in the newer release it won't be an issue.) So we just take a harddisk, turn it into installation disk and dance with SATA.

1. Get the ISO from Fedora 23 or CentOS 7.2

2. Make sure that the md5 checksum is matched.

3. Prepare a installation harddisk. The command dd can save our life.

   sudo dd if=/path/to/Fedora.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=1M conv=fsync

Installation

UEFI

Now we want to boot installation harddisk. There is only an UEFI shell after we press the power button.

The following command can invoke the GRUB on our harddisk.

FS1:\EFI\BOOT\BOOTAA64.efi

Note that the FS1 should be replaced with disk symbol respectively. It may be FS0, FS1 or similar. Please try it out if booting fail.

GRUB

GRUB will do lots of fabulous jobs for us. In most of the case, We don't need to modify anything in GRUB.

Note that if there is something funky in devicetree, don't afraid to press e to enter edit mode, when the GRUB menu appear. We can change the boot instruction into something like this:

entry {

    linux /vmlinuz
    initrd /initrd.img
    devicetree /some.dtb

}

Installation Process

NOTE: You must have a Console wire to connect ttyS0

VGA ports won't display any installation option but display only kernel log. Using console to start VNC mode or install Linux in text mode.

screen /dev/ttyS0 115200

Known Issue

Virtualization

KVM works fine.

Xen status unknown.

PCIe

PCIe doesn't work fine. We can download MP30AR0 devicetree from offical website

SFP+

Only one port works. To enable another port, download MP30AR0 devicetree from offical website

ACPI

ACPI only works on CentOS, RHELSA, but Fedora.

Reference

Richard WM Jones Blogs