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ASRock J3455-ITX mainboard issues

Offline turandot

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ASRock J3455-ITX mainboard issues
« on: April 30, 2017, 09:01:59 PM »
Recently I bought the above mainboard with Apollo Lake CPU to replace one of my servers. Unfortunately I am facing a few of issues with it.

Booting in UEFI mode is not possible: neither a USB stick nor a DVD with SME 9.1 x64 are detected. (Secure boot is disabled.) A quick cross check with a Win X DVD showed, that Win X boots in the UEFI mode without any problem. Disabling UEFI i.e. working with the classical BIOS mode solves this issue. Reading https://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS6.8 , I would have assumed that UEFI should work... Any idea how to use the mainboard in the UEFI mode?

Installation in the BIOS mode principally works. The following message is displayed on boot:
Code: [Select]
Detected CPU family 6 model 92
Warning: Intel CPU model - this hardware has not undergone testing by Red Hat and might not be certified. Please consult https:// hardware.redhat.com/ for certified hardware.
Nevertheless the system boots after ~2 minutes just showing the above message. This delay is cumbersome. Any ideas how to get rid of this delay? Any thoughts, whether this is a problem, or not?

When then system is running, it works "principally". It seems to be rather slow compared to much older hardware, and I even sometimes see a noticeable delay while typing on the keyboard. Is this due to the rather "old" kernel?

turandot
« Last Edit: April 30, 2017, 09:04:13 PM by turandot »

Offline Jean-Philippe Pialasse

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Re: ASRock J3455-ITX mainboard issues
« Reply #1 on: May 01, 2017, 08:19:53 PM »
Have you tried with last Centos 6.8 or 6.9 DVD ?

Have you tried the SME 9.2 iso ?

I believe we lack people with UEFI only hardware to test the SME iso.

However if you check at CentOS forum about UEFI support, even if it install it finish with some issues and does not start unless you use a fedora iso to repair it , and install grub2.

Sad to hear it is slow in legacy bios mod... This could be either because of not supported cPU by red hat or becaue of the legacy mode ( seen this problem with legacy pata mode with sata)

Offline turandot

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Re: ASRock J3455-ITX mainboard issues
« Reply #2 on: May 01, 2017, 09:07:28 PM »
Many thanks, Jean-Philippe!
Have you tried with last Centos 6.8 or 6.9 DVD ?
Good point! I made a quick check with both a CentOS 6.8 as well as 7.3 DVD: no success booting in UEFI mode. So no wonder why i does not work with SME.
Have you tried the SME 9.2 iso ?
Yes, the result is negative for UEFI mode as well.
I believe we lack people with UEFI only hardware to test the SME iso.
This is my first UEFI machine as well :-} And offering help here does not make too much sense, at least at the moment, if upstream CentOS does not support it...
Sad to hear it is slow in legacy bios mod... This could be either because of not supported cPU by red hat or becaue of the legacy mode ( seen this problem with legacy pata mode with sata)
Could be, I had the same idea as well, so I wanted to check an installation in UEFI mode, result as above :-}

What I find though is this post https://www.centos.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=60018#p253792 So I just tried to add
Code: [Select]
mce=off to /boot/grub/grub.conf . Although I do not understand all the details, I have the impression that the machine speed is a bit faster, especially the weird keyboard delay is much better now.

/boot/grub/grub.conf is probably updated with any kernel update, right? Is it the right thing to prepare a custom template /etc/e-smith/templates-custom/boot/grub/grub.conf with the two lines
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mce=off
timeout=10
The second line is just for convenience, because my VGA display needs quite a moment to sync, and often the Grub screen is hardly visible or even unvisible...

Thank you,

turandot

Offline lc_lol

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Re: ASRock J3455-ITX mainboard issues
« Reply #3 on: February 26, 2018, 11:21:54 PM »
Hi,

There are major issues in CentOS with Apollo Lake CPUs. Please look here for the bug and workarounds https://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=12569

I'm currently running elrepo kernel-ml over SME 9.2 and my problems are gone. I have to check some operations at startup. If they look ok, I'll open a new thread with the complete howto for installing and running this kernel :)

See you then

Offline janet

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Re: ASRock J3455-ITX mainboard issues
« Reply #4 on: February 27, 2018, 08:42:16 AM »
turandot

Quote
/boot/grub/grub.conf is probably updated with any kernel update, right? Is it the right thing to prepare a custom template /etc/e-smith/templates-custom/boot/grub/grub.conf with the two lines
Code: [Select]
mce=off
timeout=10

AFAIK grub.conf is not templated so just add or change the entries directly in /boot/grub/grub.conf
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