Re: [gentoo-user] New AMD hardware. Still can't boot (but making progress).

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Mick and the whole World.

On Tue, Apr 25, 2017 at 00:00:07 +0100, Mick wrote:

> Have a look here in case it helps:

> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRUB#RAID

In the end, I went with grub2, and it has taken a lot of effort to get
not very far.  Grub's documentation is suboptimal.

The state I've managed to get to is that grub appears to have loaded my
kernel (it no longer gives an error message about it not being loaded),
but then hangs without the kernel outputting even a single message.  At
this point, only the reset-button will do anything - Ctrl-Alt-Del does
nothing.

Just for reference's sake, my boot setup is EFI on GPT.  I have two NVMe
SSDs, which will be working together in several mdadm RAID pairs.  grub
can read my SSDs, reporting correctly their partitioning and being able
to cat the grub configuration file.

So, why, after apparently loading the kernel, does grub fail to start it?
Any ideas, anybody?

Here are the relevant bits of my grub.cfg:

#########################################################################

# Example configuration for GRUB
# Much of this example configuration was taken from the GRUB manual.

# Menu timeout
timeout=5

# Default menu entry
default=0

# If we have a font available, start graphical output.
if loadfont unifont; then
	echo "Loading unifont"
	# Output resolution for GRUB (eg. 1024x768 or 'auto').
	gfxmode=auto

	# Output resolution for Linux (VESAFB only).
	# 'keep' means use the same resolution as GRUB.
	# For other framebuffer drivers, pass a resolution using the video= kernel param.
	gfxpayload=keep

	# Load all video drivers.
	insmod all_video

	# Switch to graphical output.
	terminal_output gfxterm
fi

# Load modules necessary to find any boot files (/boot).

# Partition table(s).
#insmod part_msdos
insmod part_gpt

# Necessary for the root partition
insmod mdraid1x
insmod mdraid09

# Necessary for kernel messages to show
insmod efi_gop
insmod efi_uga
insmod font
if loadfont ${prefix}/fonts/unicode.pf2
then
	insmod gfxterm
	set gfxmode=auto
	set gfxpayload=keep
	terminal_output gfxterm
fi

menuentry "Gentoo Linux 4.9.16-1" {
	# Filesystem for /boot
	#insmod btrfs
	insmod fat
	insmod exfat
	insmod ext2
	#insmod xfs
	#insmod zfs

	# Search all block devices for a matching UUID (for /boot)
	#search --set=root --fs-uuid 33d4013a-ec25-4462-a540-8078aeb8ed17
	#search --set=root (md/127)
	#root=(md/127)
	set root=(hd1,gpt2) # i.e. /boot
	echo "Just set root"

	# Load a linux kernel, passing the root filesystem and init process as parameters
	echo "Loading kernel..."
	echo "grub_platform = " $grub_platform
	gfxpayload=text # For debugging.
	linux /vmlinuz-4.9.16-gentoo root=/dev/md127 #rootfstype=btrfs init=/usr/lib/systemd/systemd
	echo "just loaded kernel"
	boot

	#echo "Loading initramfs..."
	#initrd /initramfs-4.7.2.img
}

#########################################################################

> --
> Regards,
> Mick

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).