Dell Venue 8 Pro imaging/eMMC
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I’ve been a long time user of FOG and although I got EFI and etc to work nicely, I have now run into a bit of a brick wall on imaging devices with eMMC instead of SSD.
I just received a lot of Venue 8 Pros and I cannot get FOG to recognize the storage in them because it uses eMMC. I am using kernel 4.1.6 from TomElliot and the Venue 8 Pro can PXE boot just fine up to the point where you try to get it to image and it will say no disk found OR run diagnostics and it says there is no disk.
Running diagnostics, I see a lot of /dev/ram0-14 but don’t see anything starting with mmc. Is there some modification needed to the kernel itself or to initrd or similar?
Unfortunately in this instance, I have no handle on the purchase or choice of this particular set of devices.
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What version of FOG are you using?
And if we can figure out what Linux calls the card, we can simply specify the device’s hard disk name in the host properties. This feature is available in FOG Trunk, as is the debug upload feature. Debug will allow you to look through all those devices you’re seeing and figure out which one it actually is.
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I am on SVN 4543. When you say debug upload, do you mean to use the CLI and see what dmesg shows?
If yes, using debug mode, I’m not seeing anything that starts with /sdX or /hdX or /mmcX I don’t see anything “Samsung” or “mmc” in dmesg as I understand the eMMC is from them.
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@AsGF2MX Look through all of them. If you need to, mount each one manually and then take a peek inside - see what’s there.
What does this output?
fdisk -lAlso - when figuring this out, you don’t have to solely rely on the debug upload - throw in a Linux live thumbdrive or live CD or network boot to live Linux and see if Linux will even recognize it and - if it does - what does it call it?
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As far as I can see there is no MMC support compiled into the current FOG kernel. I guess you are the first one asking
See here: http://sourceforge.net/p/freeghost/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/kernel/TomElliott.config.64
... # CONFIG_MMC is not set ...I guess Tom will happily add MMC support and compile a new kernel in the next few days…
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@Uncle-Frank Or 10 minutes :). I’m currently rebuilding the kernels and they should be complete in about 4 minutes.
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Kernels are updated. Just rerun your installer if you’re on development and you should have kernels with mmc support baked in. The config files are already updated for this.
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We probably need to tune scripts as well to make devicenames like /dev/mmcblkX work but lets see if the new kernel is bringing up those first.
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You’re probably correct, though We have made great strides to make the “block” device as generic as possible. If they’re running on Trunk/Dev, things should be okay.
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@Tom-Elliott Are you meaning to say that I should do a git pull first to get the new kernels? If so, I do have a test FOG environment and will do so on that. Just in case I need to break something :).
Please advise.
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since you’re running a relatively recent version of trunk, running the installer you already have should automatically download the latest kernel as it runs
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I just updated the kernel in place and it seems that just like 4.1.6 kernel that the fdisk -l produces 15 devices named /dev/ram0 to dev/ram15 at 124MiB each.
I am going to run the install script just in case there are some other changes involved.
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Yeah, I did not update 4.1.6. I Updated 4.2.0. This will not work on kernel 4.1.6.
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Well this thread made a whole lot of progress in a short period of time… Job well done. I’m leaving it to you guys to figure out the rest lol.
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@Tom-Elliott I am on the latest git and Kernel 4.2.0 right now and it’s still showing the odd /dev/ram0-15. I ran through dmesg and I see the following points of interest:
multiple occureneces of Not using MMCONFIG
Then:
ACPI PNP0A08:00: _OSC: OSC failed (AE_ERROR); disabling ASPM
ACPI PNP0A08:00 fail to add MMCONFIG information, can’t access extended PCI configuration space under this bridge.There is a Winbond W83L51xD SD/MMC card interface driver showing a bit further down but that looks like the MicroSD card on the side.
Sidebar - if I want to boot an ISO via iPXE, how would I do so? I’m currently at home and I just realized I haven’t got a single USB drive on me. I do however have ISOs on my ESXi box and also I got FOG. Not trying to go off topic but trying to see if Ubuntu iso or even clonezilla will identify the storage device.
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@AsGF2MX said:
fail to add MMCONFIG information
MMCONFIG is not MMC! AFAIK this error is unrelated. See here: http://lwn.net/Articles/263288/
Don’t you see anything about mmcblk in dmesg? Like here: https://gist.github.com/thomasdziedzic/01482f33aba5971845b3
Booting ISO from iPXE is possible. Search the forums for “ISO” and you should find a lot of information about it.
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@Uncle-Frank Did not spot the missing C - I thought it was MMC CONFIG. I was searching for mmc in dmesg and that’s all it showed. Searched for blk as well and got nothing. Do you know what kernel generated that particular output? I don’t have any custom settings in my FOG setup except that I am forcing the boot of the 32-bit kernel and not the 64-bit one via the UI so I have to ask if any specific switches or anything is needed anywhere? As usual, I have secure boot disabled as well.
On the ISOs, I did find the some info but I couldn’t make sense of where to put those lines in within the UI. On the other hand I did grab an SD card reader and I have a clean SD card so I will try to make a bootable drive or two in a few hours and hopefully get something back.
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That did help me to get an active partition but it seems Ubuntu is a non-starter as I couldn’t even boot it. I was then able to just unzip the ISO contents of Clonezilla alternate stable (current off site) and boot.
It is on kernel 3.16.0-4-amd64 and there is an MMC block device shown.
There is indeed and mmcblk0 being shown in clonezilla but I can’t get the 4.2 kernels from yesterday to do the same. I tried to find the header file for the kernel build options but I couldn’t find it from the sourceforge portal.
How can I help troubleshoot this further?
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@Tom-Elliott might have updated the kernel - but sometimes changes need made in the inits too, wonder if he did that?