UEFI booting with Yoga 370

[george1421]

@Brian-Hoehn It would be interesting to know if usb booting directly info FOS gives you the same issue as ipxe -> fos. There is a guide here on how to build a usb boot drive to boot into FOS via grub. https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/7727/building-usb-booting-fos-image

[Iceman344]

@george1421 I tried out your guide and got the yoga to boot fog from the usb stick under efi but the result is still the same once it loads the actual task (the pxe menu itself works fine). Any futher steps i can take to enable more debugging ?

[Sebastian Roth]

@Brian-Hoehn @Iceman344 Possibly you are using a similar USB adapter that is causing us problems here: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/10250/hp-stream-11-g3-locks-up-after-init-xz/

Could you both please follow my latest post in this thread, post your lspci output, and try out the provided iPXE binaries. Probably best if you start with 03_undionly.kpxe and post a picture/screenshot here.

[Brian Hoehn]

@Sebastian-Roth I haven’t had any issue with legacy booting. Just UEFI.
I’ll see if I can do some testing on this tomorrow.

[Sebastian Roth]

@Brian-Hoehn Working on so many differnt iPXE issues at the moment I obviously got things mixed up. Sorry for that!

So let’s start just as we did with the HP stream device in legacy mode. I compiled a debug enabled (DEBUG=bzimage,image) binary for you to test and see if it properly goes loading the kernel. Find 01_ipxe.efi here. Please post a screenshot/picture.

[Sebastian Roth]

@Brian-Hoehn @Iceman344 Beside testing the binary, could you also boot up your Yogas into a debug upload task and run the following command when you get to the shell: lsusb
Please take a picture and post here. As well you might want to send the exact name of this USB NIC(s) you are using.

[Sebastian Roth]

@Brian-Hoehn @Iceman344 Any news on this??

[Iceman344]

@Sebastian-Roth we are 100% focused on organizing a conference atm so i have not had time for this issue. Begining to end of August however i will have full dedication to this.

[Iceman344]

@sebastian-roth So, i followed the suggested steps and here are my results.

Booting with the EFI fog stick with debug enabled gave some more information, though i’m sure it will say more for you then me.

I pulled verbose lists of both the usb and pci devices and attached them below.
As far as i see the hub is under the 0x17ef vendor-id.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/dh153eh6ar3o391/lsusb.txt
http://www.mediafire.com/file/n7s11lvpz7v27cc/lspci.txt

Apologies for my late reply on the problem.

[Sebastian Roth]

@Iceman344 Thanks for getting back to this and updating the information. Interestingly enough I see this in the lspcioutput:

00:1f.6 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection (4) I219-V (rev 21)

And why I search for the specs of the Yoga 370 I find this indeed saying that the Yoga 370 comes with a proper Intel NIC chip onboard. But maybe you’d need to buy those extension cords to use the onboard Intel NIC. And we still don’t know of UEFI firmware would still fail to play a nice game with us. But I thought I’d mention this in case you wanna give it a shot.

Ok back to the USB NIC, it has USB ID 17ef:3062 which seems to be another one of those honky RTL8152 (USB2.0) or RTL8153 (USB3.0) based chips - see here.

Here is the next debug build iPXE binary 02_ipxe.efi for you to test (DEBUG=image,init,efi_image). Let’s see if we can get more information. As I don’t have a machine here to test right now this is kind of a “blind build”. Let’s hope I got it all right. Please take a picture and post here again.

[Iceman344]

@sebastian-roth Yep they do have a nice onboard NIC but as you also correctly noted they need a special adapter to break out the connector to be actually usable (100% crap imho). But as we got a bunch of the lenovo hubs for this device we would love to be able to use that one so no extra desk diving and replugging needs to happen.

Anyway this is the result after booting the new bootloader,

[Sebastian Roth]

@Iceman344 Yeah, one step closer. I feel this is failing very early in the process where iPXE hands off to the kernel. Alright, next with more debug output is 03_ipxe.efi (download). I am sorry for this step by step action but AFAIK there is no other way to find where this actually hangs. We’ll take another 2 or 3 iterations till we actually hit the exact spot I suppose.

Would you mind using the normal forum picture upload function (the most right symbol above the text field) as those photobucket pictures are not really working. Hope you didn’t mind me editing your other posts and adding the pics directly.

[Iceman344]

@sebastian-roth So update ! The new bootloader shows some more info and boots nicely to the menu. Problem right now is that the debug info goes a little quick. I got some footage with a camera but the 30fps limit doesn’t help, so i winged it with some burst mode pictures. Tomorrow i’ll capture the HDMI output straight to get more acurate info. Is there any way to make it dump the output to the file system its running on ?

Also i totally understand the iteration issue. I’ll be here to test !

This is as much info as i could get out of the footage.

This after selecting “Client System Information” as a test

Also on a side note i did not realise that pictures could be uploaded and inserted this way. I’ve replaced the ones in the previous posts

[Sebastian Roth]

@iceman344 said in UEFI booting with Yoga 370:

… and boots nicely to the menu.

This is because you used a different client this time - see the different MAC addresses in the pictures. For this host no task has been scheduled and therefor you got the FOG menu. But that’s ok I reckon. The last of the three pictures you posted lately is a good pointer on where things go wrong.

Although we must be very close to the “hang” (as I don’t see many function calls further down that way in the code) I still have no clue why this would stall. Possibly this is not a hang but more of an infinite loop. We’ll see from the next debug output - 04_ipxe.efi (download). Don’t worry about taking a slow motion video if it hangs. We just need to see the very last output. In case it loops over and over a video might be handy but I guess we could even go with a picture then. So no need for high tech video capturing I reckon.

Also i totally understand the iteration issue. I’ll be here to test !

Thanks a lot for taking this up with me.

[Iceman344]

@sebastian-roth Ah yes, this is because i was using an already in place thunderbolt-dock, but had to fetch a new one as it was needed. The machine is still the same however.

So now this is the last message i get

[Sebastian Roth]

@Iceman344 Right now to me this looks as if iPXE is just waiting for the TCP connection to close. For some reason the other communication partner (FOG server in this case I reckon) seems to not properly close the connection and iPXE is waiting for it. This is just an assumption up to now as we don’t have a packet dump of the communication yet. Might be one of the next steps. Don’t get me wrong. I still think this is something caused by the Realtek USB NIC… we’ll figure it out at some point I am sure.

But first please try simple waiting. Use 05_ipxe.efi (again added more debug output - download), take a picture of the screen where it hangs and then just let it sit there for a couple of hours. Check on it every now and then to see if it went any further or if it just sits at this stage for ever.

[Iceman344]

@sebastian-roth I loaded up the image and let it run for a bit (it took a while as it had to dump all the tcp handshakes). I let the laptop stay on for a while after this but nothing further happened.

[Sebastian Roth]

@Iceman344 I am sorry but I still don’t see the logic behind this. Maybe I just can’t see the wood for the trees right now. Again added more debug output in 06_ipxe.efi (download) and also compiled 07_ipxe.efi that skips the TCP shutdown code altogether. Sure this is really ugly but let’s see what happens with this. Again try it out and take a picture when it hangs. Thanks!

[Iceman344]

@sebastian-roth Running 06_ipxe did not produce a different output to number 5 at first glance.

However 07_ipxe did trow out something else. It hung this time on removing devices. I’m guessing this is because of bad handover from the bootloader to the kernel ?

Not ugly imho, pretty cool to see the packets flow by

[Sebastian Roth]

@Iceman344 This combination of hardware, USB NIC and UEFI firmware is just a piece of s**t I reckon. Sorry for using those words but I can’t believe it’s hanging on one of the other shutdown functions as well, now that we skipped tHe TCP shutdown function. There are six if I remember correctly…
I will look into this when I get home.