3.8.16 seems to not like Braswell N3700 UEFI

Ever since updating to 3.6.16 and rebooting that’s the end of my Asrock N3700 ITX Rockstor install. Reinstall seems impossible in GPT/UEFI although it works in Bios/MBR.

Numerous timeouts and eventually drop to dracut occur when trying to Uefi boot a usb (or DVD). It just doesn’t work at all.

I had enough trouble installing the system on 14 because the network had to be configured manually.

Any ideas? This might have also been after a motherboard self update. Not sure about that one. EDIT Motherboard is at latest release 1.70

This is what is reported for some time before eventual failure to dracut

14.0204471 [drm:valleyview_update_vm [1915] ERROR timed out waiting for Punit DDR DVFS request

Hello @tazzydemon and a very belated ‘Welcome to the Rockstor forum’.

I had a quick search for your reported error and came up with a kernel bug:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=91629
which has apparently been fixed in later kernels but the Rockstor / CentOS installers both use older kernels anyway so not sure what’s going on there. There will hopefully be an updated installer (probably based on CentOS 7.3) available in the future but I don’t know when, we had to back out of that plan with the latest Rockstor iso release as it was all a bit too last minute but we do have an issue open in the rockstor-iso repo:

So maybe there has been some backports or the like that address this.

You could try installing a generic CentOS 7.3 and see how it goes, might be useful info on that issue.

I have an ASrock N3700 ITX here as one of my Rockstor machines, but I have only tried it in BIOS/MBR mode. I intend to use it in some future GPT/UEFI tests but alas haven’t yet gotten around to this. My BIOS/MBR install was without issue but that was a little while ago, ie no network issue for me.

There is another thread on the forum where I report details of the network card built into my board, it’s presumably the same as the one in yours:

I had no network issue here during or after install but again this was with BIOS boot install only.

That machine is now running 3.8.16-8 and all appears to be OK still. I’ll try and report back here once I get around to my UEFI tests. My bios version for this board is currently:

dmidecode -t bios | grep "Vendor\|Version\|Release"
	Vendor: American Megatrends Inc.
	Version: P1.30
	Release Date: 08/19/2015

So I’m due to update actually.

Hope that helps; at least with some context.

Im not quite sure where this leaves me in terms of finding or trying an installer.

  1. Is there a later one that 16-1 that I can dowload and try
  2. Am I expected to roll my own new Centos installer from the link above? Might try a new minimum centos anyway
  3. Should I just give up and re-install Bios/MBR before I wear out my ssd
  4. Just trying a fresh Centos minimal right now

So CentOS-7-x86_64-Minimal-1611.iso installs fine on my N3700 box in UEFI mode. It even offers BTRFS which was a surprise.

Now I am installing Rockstor on my windows Virtualbox so I can try to roll my own. I wish I didnt have to! All I have done with this in the last year is fiddle with it (partly because of me and partly because of the way I want to mirror its storage to the cloud - something I have not yet really sorted)

And now I will need another rego code. Drat.

My python build script fails… so more work needed from me…

@tazzydemon For the time being you may be better off just installing using the 3.8.15 iso, picking your update channel and updating: ie as per my recent post with another forum report of installer difficulties related to our 3.8.16 iso:

I have linked back to this thread in the indicated issue to build a list of relevant installer issue reports.

That’s what I did do, sort of.

.14 to .15 to .16 and then it broke. I don’t have a copy of the .15 iso as far as I know.

What I might do is get a previous Centos minimal and see of that is broken on my mobo too. My feeling is that it will be.

A Braswell mobo is perfect for this use so I might just wait until the next release based on 1611 since I think its outside my knowledge scope to build a new ISO based on 1611 .

Interesting that BTRFS is a choice in Centos 1611 a? (NZ, like Canadian ay!)