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  • Debian Bookworm+ on Cavium ThunderX?

    From Steffen Grunewald@21:1/5 to All on Fri Apr 12 09:40:01 2024
    Good morning,

    I beg your pardon if this problem has been discussed before, but I couldn't find anything useful in the list archives.

    We've been operating a Gigabyte R120-T35-00 (Mainboard model MT30-GS2-00) equipped with a Cavium ThunderX (CN8880) 32-core processor, for several
    years now.
    It was delivered with Debian preinstalled in 2018, so that must have been Stretch, also confirmed by my handwritten notes which list kernel 4.9.0.

    Upgrading to Debian Buster was successful, the current kernel is 4.19.0-25
    aka 4.19.289-2. (It doesn't even properly identify the CPU, only gives a BogoMIPS value of 200.00.)

    Any attempt to boot a Bullseye (5.x) or Bookworm kernel (6.x) resulted in
    an early kernel panic.

    Is it possible to upgrade this machine to a more recent distribution, and
    if so, what are the tricks (kernel parameters etc.)?

    Any hint, pointer, suggestion is welcome.

    Thanks,
    Steffen

    --
    Steffen Grunewald, Cluster Administrator
    Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute)
    Am Mühlenberg 1 * D-14476 Potsdam-Golm * Germany
    ~~~
    Fon: +49-331-567 7274
    Mail: steffen.grunewald(at)aei.mpg.de
    ~~~

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  • From Steffen Grunewald@21:1/5 to Paul Wise on Wed Apr 17 16:40:01 2024
    On Mon, 2024-04-15 at 14:55:06 +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
    On Fri, 2024-04-12 at 09:28 +0200, Steffen Grunewald wrote:

    Any attempt to boot a Bullseye (5.x) or Bookworm kernel (6.x) resulted in an early kernel panic.

    Try the latest sid kernel (6.7.9) and the latest upstream too.

    Doing so the Debian way would require a major upgrade of the related tools (most notably, gcc), also to build some initrd - something I'd like to avoid
    on the only system with that kind of hardware I have.

    I'll go for some live distros first since I cannot fully exclude "just a missing kernel parameter", and Ubuntu 23.10 seems to be the newest I can
    get hold of. Previous attempts used PXE boot, so kernel parameters might
    be something to look for first.

    This
    sounds like something that will need a git bisect to figure out though. https://wiki.debian.org/DebianKernel/GitBisect

    That's the really time-consuming part...
    I'm kind of surprised that nobody else seems to use this hardware platform?

    Thanks so far,
    Steffen

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  • From Lennart Sorensen@21:1/5 to Steffen Grunewald on Wed Apr 17 21:50:02 2024
    On Wed, Apr 17, 2024 at 04:37:50PM +0200, Steffen Grunewald wrote:
    On Mon, 2024-04-15 at 14:55:06 +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
    On Fri, 2024-04-12 at 09:28 +0200, Steffen Grunewald wrote:

    Any attempt to boot a Bullseye (5.x) or Bookworm kernel (6.x) resulted in an early kernel panic.

    Try the latest sid kernel (6.7.9) and the latest upstream too.

    Doing so the Debian way would require a major upgrade of the related tools (most notably, gcc), also to build some initrd - something I'd like to avoid on the only system with that kind of hardware I have.

    I'll go for some live distros first since I cannot fully exclude "just a missing kernel parameter", and Ubuntu 23.10 seems to be the newest I can
    get hold of. Previous attempts used PXE boot, so kernel parameters might
    be something to look for first.

    This
    sounds like something that will need a git bisect to figure out though. https://wiki.debian.org/DebianKernel/GitBisect

    That's the really time-consuming part...
    I'm kind of surprised that nobody else seems to use this hardware platform?

    Back when I had a user for such machines, no one would sell you one unless
    you were a large cloud provider. Then I changed jobs and no longer have
    any need for it, but at least it seems there is some option to buy them
    these days.

    Did you check if it has a /boot/config file for the working kernel that
    you could compare to see if there were any interesting options it had
    enabled that the current debian kernel doesn't?

    Of course if support for the CPU was never merged to the mainline kernel,
    then you are probably out of luck.

    I do see
    /usr/lib/linux-image-6.1.0-0.deb11.13-arm64/cavium/thunder-88xx.dtb in
    the kernel package, so at least that is promising. Is the machine using
    UEFI or some custom boot method? I see dtb files in the "BIOS" update,
    so I am guessing it isn't UEFI.

    It certainly looks like one of the weirder designs, and gigabyte seems
    to have stuppod any support 5 years ago.

    --
    Len Sorensen

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  • From Wookey@21:1/5 to Steffen Grunewald on Wed Apr 17 22:30:01 2024
    On 2024-04-17 16:37 +0200, Steffen Grunewald wrote:
    On Mon, 2024-04-15 at 14:55:06 +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
    On Fri, 2024-04-12 at 09:28 +0200, Steffen Grunewald wrote:

    Any attempt to boot a Bullseye (5.x) or Bookworm kernel (6.x) resulted in an early kernel panic.

    That's the really time-consuming part...
    I'm kind of surprised that nobody else seems to use this hardware platform?

    I think I had one in the past. I may still have one in the pile. If I
    can find it I'll try to take a look at this, but I'm short of tuits, especuially until the time64 transition is over the hump.

    Is yours actual ThunderX or ThunderX2? I recall the former being more or less unobtanium.

    Wookey
    --
    Principal hats: Debian, Wookware, ARM
    http://wookware.org/

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