Rockstor 4 Pi build first observations

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@GeoffA Hello again, and thanks for an excellent report. I can chip in with some elements of this.

This is a known upstream issue, see:

And the solution in short is to add the following to /boot/config.txt (may be in another location on live system) to configure the Pi4 on boot to avoid this log spam.

# Disable polling for SD-card
dtparam=sd_poll_once=on

I’m not sure of the consequences of doing this automatically within our installer thought. But we could.

This is non Pi4 specific. I’ve had this also on recent regular x86_64 builds. The browser url gets ‘stuck’. Visiting any other page frees it up I believe.

Curios. I’ve not actually tried this. The Pi4 I have here for building Arm64 installer profiles (Pi4 and ARM64EFI) and Arm64 rpms, has only a single USB-to-SATA adapter in uasp mode with SSD attached.

Yes, super annoying and makes it hard to diagnose anything else. Apply the above fix and then things will calm down considerable so one can see the logs then. These messages got to log and standard out. Let us know if this works for you also and if your end up find out the consequences let us know here. Pretty sure we can just edit this in with the installer if it’s safe to do so.

Yes, I was quite chuffed to finally see that for myself here, could hardly believe it when I first saw it :slight_smile: .

I was surprised as the responsiveness myself. And works much better from an SSD with a descent uasp compatible (and working as some have flaky drivers) adapter.

OK, strange but if this was directly after first install boot, although Rockstor does work directly after install, I have my doubts as to it’s full function. So this may have been directly after initial install. Otherwise no idea currently.

That would be great. As to pointers, given you Pi4 obviously has had it’s EEPROM updated but in the Pi4 world this has to, ideally, be kept in sync with the rest of the boot system with lives in the firmware files. Try overwriting the start4* and fixup4* files on the installed Rockstor disk with those found in a fully updated (on your Pi4 so it also updates your EEPROM boot bit) Raspberry Pi OS. The default ones in openSUSE Leap 15.2 are I believe matched with an older pre USB boot Pi4 EEPROM. I think I had assumed not updating these files would render USB boot completely disfunctional and so I may have just done this quick as I needed to get our Arm64 build system up quickly. And have unfortunately had little time there after to test our resulting installers pre/post firmware file updates etc.

Thanks for getting the ball rolling on the Pi4 testing. Much appreciated. Bit in the middle of things currently hence the vague dir location re firmware files but given your Pi4 familiarity you will likely find them just fine. Really depends on if you are booting into the image in question or mounting say the sdcard on another linux system to make the changes there.

Incidentally in our build setup for the arm side of things I’ve used KVM on the Pi4 and it’s working a treat, bar some version drift between my various machines. I was chuffed to find this worked without issue. Although I’ve heard otherwise on a podcast and it was just not my experience. This was where the host OS was JeOS Leap 15.2 image, same as what Rockstor 4 is based on.

Hope that helps and thanks again for sharing your findings re the Pi4 installer. Much appreciated.

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