The HPC Lab needs to use machines that are in pre-production and development stage, so a few quirks may be necessary to get them behaving like standard data centre machines.
Firmware / BIOS
D03/D05
Upgrade the firmware, as described here.
Use the latest firmware from releases.linaro.org.
Upstream firmware, based on Linaro's builds, to be found in estuary.org.
Centriq
Amberwings don't come ready to PXE boot automatically.
The network stack needs to be enabled in the BIOS screen, as described here.
ThunderX2
Upgrade the BIOS, as described in their internal documents (not public), using IPMI and the new hpm images.
Operating System
CentOS
AArch64 support in CentOS is done via AltArch. The repository and kernel images are available from their mirror, but that's always the latest release only.
To install CentOS via PXE on Mr-Provisioner, use the following parameters:
- Kernel: AltArch vmlinuz
- Initrd: AltArch initrd.img
- Kickstart: Linaro's mini-install (as a starting point)
Kernel cmdline: earlycon console=ttyAMA0,115200 ip=dhcp text inst.stage2=http://mirror.centos.org/altarch/7/os/aarch64/ inst.repo=http://mirror.centos.org/altarch/7/os/aarch64/
Note: Use ttyS0 for D03 machines, and ttyAMA0 for all others.
To use the ERP releases, change in the following way:
- Kernel/Initrd: from either releases.linaro.org or snapshots.linaro.org
- Kernel cmdline
- Replace: inst.stage2 with http://snapshots.linaro.org/96boards/reference-platform/components/centos-installer-staging/${release-build} (or equivalent in release)
- Append: inst.ks=file:/ks.cfg
Debian
To use the Debian ERP releases, just pick a release version from releases.linaro.org, for example, 17.12.
- Kernel: arm64's linux
- Initrd: arm64's initrd.gz
- Preseed: Linaro's mini-install (as a starting point)
- Kernel cmdline:earlycon console=ttyAMA0,115200
Note: Use ttyS0 for D03 machines, and ttyAMA0 for all others.
Grub Sub-Arch
Mr-Provisioner now supports two Arm64 Grub architectures: standard and forcing efiboot.
Amberwings require the efiboot flags, but the others work well with it, too. When in doubt, use efiboot and it should work.