Messages

61

User Zone / Re: Black screen instead of petitboot menu with AST (no GPU installed)

« on: February 03, 2020, 04:15:13 pm »

The image shown is a classic symptom of the VGA disable jumper still installed.  Please triple check the correct jumper was removed, and power cycle (pull power from the wall and wait for all lights to extinguish) if the problem persists.

Thanks for reminding me :-)

In fact the system is having the problems as described in the first posts, I have just tried to use the NVIDIA video card to bring back petitboot and forgotten to remove the jumper again so my last post with the picture is misleading - I will edit and mark it as irrelevant to my problem...

I have removed the jumper and the darkness is back again (black screen after the progress bar has finished)

62

User Zone / Re: Black screen instead of petitboot menu with AST (no GPU installed)

« on: February 03, 2020, 02:48:43 pm »

EDIT: This post is irrelevant - it is the result of trying to use an NVIDIA card + disabling AST via the jumper but forgetting to remove the jumper again later

I guess, you tried ssh root@blackbird ?
Ethernet is connected next to the USB ports?
Did you also try to switch off the PSU for two minutes? And then power on again.

I have connected the correct Net3 adapter (above the USB port) and can see the IP address in my router (MAC address is correct).

I did already switched off the PSU for longer (at least 15 minutes) - last resort is no to completely unplug it.

I have attached a picture of the petitboot screen (keyboard does not work - not even in different USB ports - but works on another computer).

63

User Zone / Re: Black screen instead of petitboot menu with AST (no GPU installed)

« on: February 03, 2020, 02:06:50 pm »

OK, after attaching my SATA HDD I can boot into petitboot but it hangs (keyboard not working, 10 seconds timeout not working and SSH still refuses the connection).

Really frustrating moments :-(

64

User Zone / Re: ata4: softreset failed. ata4.00 disabled (SATA devices not working sometimes)

« on: February 03, 2020, 01:50:39 pm »

To be honest, that kind of hardware incompatibility would be very strange indeed.  Any chance you can try a different card in the same PCIe slot to see if the same problem is triggered?

At the moment I am suffering from the inability to boot into and see petitboot (even without any device attached except network cable at net3):

https://forums.raptorcs.com/index.php/topic,49.0.html

So do you mean to try any type of PCIe card (not neccessarily an NVMe adapter card because I have already used another adapter card but in the same slot)...

65

User Zone / Re: Black screen instead of petitboot menu with AST (no GPU installed)

« on: February 03, 2020, 01:15:35 pm »

Have you removed the AST disable jumper?

Check - yes

I have tried to connect to OpenBMC via SSH but no success so far (IP address is correct according to the MAC address).

But ssh root@<my-ip> says:

> ssh: connect to host x.x.x.x port 22: Connection refused

I have not even the chance to enter my password :-(

66

User Zone / Black screen instead of petitboot menu with AST (no GPU installed)

« on: February 03, 2020, 11:46:05 am »

I have played around with a Geforce GTX 1050 Ti in the PCIe port but did not manage to use it with nouveau, so I have removed the card from the mother board again.

Now I can see the boot process via AST at my display until it finishes (progress bar at them bottom) and then the screen becomes black.

Obviously also no operating system is booted automatically (after the usual 10 seconds timout) - playing with the cursor keys and pressing enter does also not have any effect.

How can I diagnose this or reset petitiboot?

I have not changed any Blackbird firmware so it should work OOTB...

Edit: I have already tried the usual cold boot (power off) and unplugging any devices (PCIe and SATA)

67

Firmware / Update of skiboot bootloader due to dmesg: IMC PMU (null) Register failed

« on: February 03, 2020, 07:11:53 am »

When opening the shell in petitboot I can browse the dmesg results for failure. I have found one message saying:

Code: [Select]

[   4.145855] IMC Unknown Device type
[   4.145857] IMC PMU (null) Register failed
I was wondering if this is critical and found a kernel patch to suppress this message (so it must be OK):

https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/6/20/1117

Are there plans to update petitboot & friends to get rid of this noise (and possibly fix other issues)?

THX :-)

68

User Zone / Re: ata4: softreset failed. ata4.00 disabled (SATA devices not working sometimes)

« on: February 03, 2020, 05:10:21 am »

I'd suspect one of the following:

> Hardware problem -- e.g. PSU sagging slightly under extra load from NVMe drive, causing controller or drive to malfunction

My power supply unit is quite oversized (650 W) and a famous brand.
With a SATA HDD alone it seems to work. I will try out the optical drive in another X86 Linux computer with a similar kernel (but without having a NVMe SSD available) to see what happens.
Changing the PSU would be my "last resort".

> Have you tried (carefully) removing power to the SATA drive when it's in timeout status, and reapplying it, to see if the link comes back up?

How save is this when the system is powered on and running (risk to damage the main board...)?
And how do I enforce a new PCI bus scan (does reapplying the power to the optical SATA drive cause a new scan?)?

>  Or moving the cable to a different port to see if it's the entire chip that's locked up or just the one port?

Will be my next try, currently I am running with a SATA HDD only and have observed no problems so far.

BTW: If you possible have hints or a link on how to debug a libata/marvel during booting of Linux I would try to do this (I know gdb quite well) but I am sure your time is rare so it is OK to ignore my wish ;-)

69

User Zone / Re: ata4: softreset failed. ata4.00 disabled (SATA devices not working sometimes)

« on: February 02, 2020, 03:36:31 pm »

Next step would be to change the cable, then disconnect (no more SATA devices)...

OK, short update: <tt>libata.force=norst</tt> does not solve the problem but changes only the error message:

Code: [Select]

[6.397240] ata4.00 failed to IDENTIFY (I/O error, err_mask=0x4)
emask 0x4 should mean "timeout" AFAIR

70

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: System cleaning

« on: February 02, 2020, 03:32:24 pm »

the disk utility is located exactly where it is on Ubuntu and therefore Debian.  ... The partition is 249 GB and I would have the possibility of reduce it but it won't make me do it ... Why?   

Since this is not a Power9 or Raptor specific problem but a Linux one I suggest searching and asking for answers at stackoverflow, askubuntu or some other Linux forum.
IMHO there you will find a much bigger audience to provide quick answers.

71

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: System cleaning

« on: February 02, 2020, 01:40:04 pm »

But apart from this, how do you think I can free up some space in those 16 GB? It's possible?

- Uninstall software that you don't need (/usr is quite full)
- Clean-up your home folder (eg. downloads and temp folder)
- Delete log files you find in /var

But again: 16 GB is nothing ;-)

72

User Zone / Working xorg.conf for nouveau driver for a NVIDIA graphics card?

« on: February 02, 2020, 11:16:19 am »

I am playing around with an "old" NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti in my Blackbird system with Fedora 31 but I do not manage to create a working xorg.conf.

RPMFusion does not contain the proprietary NVIDIA drivers since the ppc64le architecture seems not to be supported by NVIDIA for this GPU.

nouveau is available and I assume this driver should work on Power9

Code: [Select]

Xorg -config /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/21-gpu-driver.confto test my xorg.conf at the console complains with messages like

Code: [Select]

Fatal server error:
(EE) no screens found(EE)
(EE) Server terminated with error (1).

so it would be helpful if you could provide a working xorg.conf that uses nouveau so that I can focus on getting AST2500 out of the way (from my display)...

73

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: System cleaning

« on: February 02, 2020, 11:08:34 am »

Your system partition (root) has only 14 GB space? This is not enough! No matter how hard to you try to clean-up the space, this will become your daily job ;-)

Can you resize your partition using the "disks" tool? You will not loose your data but to be sure you can create a partition backup (image file) with the disks tools too...

74

User Zone / Re: Is it okay to hard shutdown with disconnecting power source at Petitboot screen?

« on: February 02, 2020, 11:03:54 am »

I am missing a "shutdown" menu item too ;-)

Have you already tried the "sudo shutdown now" command for clean shutdown?

75

General Discussion / Re: ASUS Hyper M.2 PCI-e X16 V2 Expansion Card and Support for RAID on CPU

« on: February 02, 2020, 11:02:13 am »

I learn that the ASUS Hyper M.2 PCI-e X16 V2 Expansion Card is one popular choice amongst AMD Ryzen Threadripper platform.

I was looking for this card too but could not find a vendor for that. I thought this card only sold together with a Threadripper main board...