On Fri, Feb 28, 2025 at 08:06:24PM -0800, ron minnich wrote:
>
> Other help: identity good netboot x86 boxes, on which NIX will boot, that
> won't break my bank account. Sadly, I've not had time to figure out why my
> pc engines won't boot. I am pretty sure it's plan 9 not being happy with
> the coreboot RSDT, but ... who knows.
>
BTW, the AM08PRO (AMD Ryzne 9, 8 hardware cores (16T)), with 32Gb of
RAM and 512Gb of SSD disk, can be used with the caveat that the BIOS
is an AMI Aptio V "mutilated", without many options, in particular
without the option to disable IOMMU.
With IOMMU on by default, the enumeration of devices goes crazy. This
impacts the USB devices so one has to add:
*nousbxhci=
to plan9.ini.
The thing can be installed on disk with some tweaks (the 9front UEFI
stub doesn't work) or can be UEFI PXE booted (my configuration is, for
now, mixed: the filesystem is on the disk, but I PXE boot the kernel).
I will try to find time on Monday or Tuesday to compile NIX and see
how it goes on this.
For the AMD IOMMU, there is apparently no one silver bullet that can
put the thing of the road: for every device, from a cursory look, the
kernel has to set a bit to 0 so that no translation is done. (Linux
stumbled on the same thing and now the booloader passes option to
allow enabling or disabling intel_iommu or amd_iommu; the USB
symptoms are exactly the ones described by Linux users, so it is
very probably related).
But one has 8 hardware cores for 399 euros or maybe less...
(When my "installation" will be finished---I have searched for ways to
circumvent the IOMMU problem, but the BIOS is at the latest version,
and the update bundles are older, so I fell back to the AMD
spec...---when I have finished, I will explain the procedure and
caveats in the nix-os pages.)
--
Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ kergis +dot+ com>
http://www.kergis.com/ http://kertex.kergis.com/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89 250D 52B1 AE95 6006
F40C
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