Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2019 22:40:58 +0100 From: kraileth@elderlinux.org To: freebsd-arm@freebsd.org Subject: ThunderX support broken since r336520 Message-ID: <20190213224058.52402wm0s4ube0ve@webmail.omc.net>
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Hi, Recently I got my hands on a Cavium ThunderX server for some tests before it is deployed for production. I wanted to install FreeBSD on it so I grabbed a 12.0 image and was surprised that it didn't work at all. The beastie menu is displayed, the kernel loaded - and then it just stops. As pointed out by Marcel Flores in December (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arm/2018-December/019130.html), 11.2 does boot to the installer however. Upgrading the system to 11-STABLE worked fine, too. Building 12-STABLE or -CURRENT resulted in a kernel that wouldn't boot. I decided to find the point where ThunderX support broke in head. It's roughly 40,000 commits from the first 12-CURRENT to today. After a few nights of checking out various old revisions of HEAD and building kernels over and over again, I found out that in r336520 Emmanuel Vadot added vt_efifb to the GENERIC kernel config on arm64. According to his commit message this was tested on PINE64 hardware - but unfortunately it obviously does not work on ThunderX. To unbreak HEAD I see basically 3 options: 1) Make the EFI FB work properly on ThunderX. This would certainly be the best solution but I have no idea whatsoever how to do it. 2) Revert. Probably not a good idea since having vt_efifb included makes sense on devices where it works. Also reverting a commit from half a year ago doesn't feel right. 3) Add a THUNDERX config that builds a working kernel and live with the fact that GENERIC does not support ThunderX for the moment. I went with the following simple config for all my further tests: /usr/src/sys/arm64/conf/THUNDERX: --------------------------------- include GENERIC ident THUNDERX nodevice vt_efifb This makes -CURRENT work again. It does _not_ make 12 (-RELEASE and -STABLE) work! There's another issue with these that was fixed in HEAD after 12 was branched off. I chased the problem down, too, but: Another issue, another mail. ThunderX is a pretty interesting platform and any help in making FreeBSD run on it again is very much appreciated. Any thoughts on this? Regards, Michael
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