Honeycomb-lx2k - First day

I managed to almost finish assembling a server-grade aarch64 system.

Here some notes

Hardware

• The honeycomb.
• SO-DIMMS (I picked the one suggested here)
• A quieter fan (the fan coming with the board is extremely noisy)
• Some storage if you do not want to use the on-board eMMC
• A case, I ended up getting a slim case but anything that supports mini-itx works.
• micro-usb cable
• sd card to flash the firmware and boot.

I do not plan to do anything GPU specific so I'm not using any GPU at least for now.

I plan to compile a lot so I put in a nice nvme.

Setup

You need to connect the PSU, the power and reset pins, mount the ram and the storage.

Connect the mini-usb to your laptop (assuming you have already the right usb-serial driver) and start the machine.

Once I powered up the PSU 2 green leds got up and the fan started to spin at a low rate. Nothing on console.

Pressing the reset button once started the boot process and the fan started to go at full speed. It is painfully noisy, I replaced it before continuing.
UPDATE: Looks like my board is faulty, normal hardware boots and reboots correctly.

I followed those instructions

=> load mmc 0:1 0xa4000000 ubuntu-core.img
440401920 bytes read in 21592 ms (19.5 MiB/s)
=> nvme scan
=> nvme info
Device 0: Vendor: 0x1987 Rev: RKT303.3 Prod: 203E0705061500174291
            Type: Hard Disk
            Capacity: 976762.3 MB = 953.8 GB (2000409264 x 512)
=> nvme write 0xa4000000 0 0xd2000

nvme write: device 0 block # 0, count 860160 ... 860160 blocks written: OK
=> boot

In the readme it mentions that it can boot from the eMMC but it does not seem to work.

I made sure the system it is working and I put ubuntu in the eMMC as well so I have a fallback.

Booting

I'm not sure if it is a board quirk or what I got is not really functional but this board does not seem to reboot nor halt correctly.
It does boot up only from a cold boot and only if I first press power it and then press reset after, it is fairly annoying. I hope it is an issue that can be addressed later.
UPDATE: The board is faulty, hopefully it will be repaired.

It uses a nice u-boot setup:

• the default bootcmd probes every device and looks for a /extlinux/extlinux.conf
• The kernel command line uses the PARTUUID to boot the right drive

  TIMEOUT 30
  DEFAULT linux
  MENU TITLE linux-lx2160a boot options
  LABEL primary
    MENU LABEL primary kernel
    LINUX /boot/Image
    FDT /boot/fsl-lx2160a-cex7.dtb
    APPEND console=ttyAMA0,115200 earlycon=pl011,mmio32,0x21c0000 default_hugepagesz=1024m hugepagesz=1024m hugepages=2 pci=pcie_bus_perf root=PARTUUID=30303030-01 rw rootwait

I installed the same image on both the eMMC and the nvme, so I ended up editing it to use directly /dev/nvme0n1p1

  TIMEOUT 30
  DEFAULT linux
  MENU TITLE linux-lx2160a boot options
  LABEL nvme0
    MENU LABEL primary kernel (nvme0)
    LINUX /boot/Image
    FDT /boot/fsl-lx2160a-cex7.dtb
    APPEND console=ttyAMA0,115200 earlycon=pl011,mmio32,0x21c0000 default_hugepagesz=1024m hugepagesz=1024m hugepages=2 pci=pcie_bus_perf root=/dev/nvme0n1p1 rw rootwait
  LABEL mmc1
    MENU LABEL primary kernel (mmc1)
    LINUX /boot/Image
    FDT /boot/fsl-lx2160a-cex7.dtb
    APPEND console=ttyAMA0,115200 earlycon=pl011,mmio32,0x21c0000 default_hugepagesz=1024m hugepagesz=1024m hugepages=2 pci=pcie_bus_perf root=PARTUUID=30303030-01 rw rootwait

Gentoo

The bootloader and kernel provided are recent enough so all I did was to install Gentoo the lazy way from the eMMC ubuntu

$ apt install btrfs-progs
$ mkfs.btrfs /dev/nvme0n1p1
$ mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt
$ cd /mnt
# change 20200508 with what's available when you try
$ wget http://distfiles.gentoo.org/experimental/arm64/stage3-arm64-20200508.tar.bz2
$ mount --rbind /dev dev
$ mount --make-rslave dev
$ mount -t proc /proc proc
$ mount --rbind /sys sys
$ mount --make-rslave sys
$ mount --rbind /tmp tmp
$ cp /etc/resolv.conf etc
$ chroot . /bin/bash
$ env-update && . /etc/profile
$ emerge-webrsync
$ emerge superadduser openssh vim
# Set the root password
$ passwd 
# enable root login
$ vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config 
# or create your user
$ superadduser your_user
$ ln -s /etc/init.d/net.{lo,eth0}
$ rc-update add sshd default
$ reboot

Simple enough.

My make.conf changes so far:

ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=~arm64
MAKEOPTS="-j 16"
EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="-j 8 --load-average 8.0"

Coming next

Tomorrow I'll probably build a new kernel since its defaults seem lacking some optional features portage would like to use for sandboxing, if something strange happens I might blog more about it.

If not I'll write an update regarding rav1e since we have 0.3.2 out (not yet in crates.io for some ongoing discussion regarding being compatible with rustc-1.36 or rustc-1.38) and probably talk a bit about the new rate control API and hopefully give a walk-through the current API (both rust and C).