serenity: Fails to boot on Stone NOTCHA-116-7 / Via C7-M netbook

I recently acquired a Stone Computers NOTCHA-116-7 netbook which seemed to me to be a perfect candidate for running Serenity due to its CPU which which roughly equivalent to a PIII/Pentium-M, 1 GB RAM, 60 GB IDE HD, PS/2 keyboard/touchpad and that all-important integrated RTL-8139 NIC.

I spent all day yesterday setting up netboot.xyz on my home network specifically so I could try to install Serenity (USB boot failed and I had difficulty opening it up to physically access the disk) but I just get a few rows of pixels at the top of the screen when I try to boot serenity. Unfortunately it lacks a serial port and so I’m unable to get any real error messages out of it so if I’ve not already specifically requested that Serenity gains the ability to be able to print boot messages to the display then I’m requesting that now in order to help debug booting on such machines.

I have been able to successfully install Debian 10 on it and I have attached the dmesg output when booting Slackware on it, the key lines of which would seem to be:

DMI: Stone-Computers NOTCHA-116-7/VIA Demo Board, BIOS 6.00 02/21/2008
...
Initializing CPU#0
Initializing HighMem for node 0 (000373fe:0003bee0)
Initializing Movable for node 0 (00000000:00000000)
Memory: 900720K/981444K available (13177K kernel code, 1176K rwdata, 4208K rodata, 1004K init, 696K bss, 80724K reserved, 0K cma-reserved, 76680K highmem)
virtual kernel memory layout:
    fixmap  : 0xfffa1000 - 0xfffff000   ( 376 kB)
  cpu_entry : 0xffc00000 - 0xffc28000   ( 160 kB)
    pkmap   : 0xff400000 - 0xff800000   (4096 kB)
    vmalloc : 0xf7bfe000 - 0xff3fe000   ( 120 MB)
    lowmem  : 0xc0000000 - 0xf73fe000   ( 883 MB)
      .init : 0xdae42000 - 0xdaf3d000   (1004 kB)
      .data : 0xda8de5e0 - 0xdae22380   (5391 kB)
      .text : 0xd9c00000 - 0xda8de5e0   (13177 kB)

Maybe this is failing due to the memory map as would seem to be the case for my other failed bare metal install? https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/issues/617

c7-m.txt

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 5 years ago
Comments: 20 (19 by maintainers)

Commits related to this issue

PATAChannel: Hang when no PCI device is found This helps aid debugging of issues such as #695, where the bridge chip that controls IDE is NOT a PIIX3/4 compatible controller. Instead of just hanging ... — committed to Quaker762/serenity by Quaker762 5 years ago
PATAChannel: Hang when no PCI device is found This helps aid debugging of issues such as #695, where the bridge chip that controls IDE is NOT a PIIX3/4 compatible controller. Instead of just hanging ... — committed to Quaker762/serenity by Quaker762 5 years ago
PATAChannel: Hang when no PCI device is found This helps aid debugging of issues such as #695, where the bridge chip that controls IDE is NOT a PIIX3/4 compatible controller. Instead of just hanging ... — committed to Quaker762/serenity by Quaker762 5 years ago
PATAChannel: Alert user when no PCI device is found This helps aid debugging of issues such as #695, where the bridge chip that controls IDE is NOT a PIIX3/4 compatible controller. Instead of just h... — committed to Quaker762/serenity by Quaker762 5 years ago
PATAChannel: Alert user when no PCI device is found This helps aid debugging of issues such as #695, where the bridge chip that controls IDE is NOT a PIIX3/4 compatible controller. Instead of just h... — committed to SerenityOS/serenity by Quaker762 5 years ago

Most upvoted comments

The garbage pixels at the top of your screen are probably text content being written into the VGA framebuffer. I would try turning off the graphical stuff that we ask grub to do in boot.s (you might want the multiboot specification handy), which should let serenity write its boot log out to the screen. This is assuming there’s not a serial port available to get some logs from.

Edit: After reading this thread all the way through, I see you’ve already done this. Hooray!

deoxxa on Oct 29, 2019

I’d suggest to try fresh again with this - so install it on the harddrive and try to boot again. We have more features to see what’s going on even without serial console. Some boot flags you might want to specify: enable_ioapic=off time=legacy disable_physical_networking disable_virtio Let me know how it goes now that our kernel is more robust than 2 years ago.

supercomputer7 on Feb 10, 2022

Will do when I next get a chance. This machine is in my office which I don’t visit very often.

Thanks for working on this @supercomputer7 !

danboid on Mar 28, 2021

lspci says it is using a CX700/VX700 RAID Controller for the IDE interface and a VT8237/VX700 PCI bridge.

Please check if you can disable the RAID functionality in the BIOS settings. It will be very useful if you can copy the lspci output here (although I gathered some info from the dmesg log). I wonder if Linux detects some sort of SAS/SATA controller (I think I saw something like that in the dmesg log) and tries to use it (again, lspci output will help here).

supercomputer7 on Oct 30, 2019

From my checking now, the problem is probably with your IDE controller. I tried to boot Serenity on q35 machine (with an AHCI controller), it halts on the same message:

MM initialized.
Initializing APIC, base: Pfee00000
Enabling local APIC for cpu #0
PIT: 1000 Hz, square wave (4a9)
PCI device: bus=0 slot=0 function=0 id=8086:29c0
PCI device: bus=0 slot=1 function=0 id=1234:1111
PCI device: bus=0 slot=2 function=0 id=8086:10d3
PCI device: bus=0 slot=3 function=0 id=1b36:000d
PCI device: bus=0 slot=4 function=0 id=8086:2415
PCI device: bus=0 slot=31 function=0 id=8086:2918
PCI device: bus=0 slot=31 function=2 id=8086:2922
PCI device: bus=0 slot=31 function=3 id=8086:2930
BXVGA: framebuffer @ Pfd000000
Process: New process PID=0 with name=colonel
Thread{0x00309788}: New thread TID=0 in colonel(0)
Process: New process PID=1 with name=init_stage2
Thread{0x0030a080}: New thread TID=0 in init_stage2(1)
Process: New process PID=2 with name=syncd
Thread{0x0030a938}: New thread TID=0 in syncd(2)
Process: New process PID=3 with name=Finalizer
Thread{0x0030b1e8}: New thread TID=0 in Finalizer(3)
Syscall: int 0x82 handler installed

This is your IDE Controller according to your dmesg log:

pci 0000:00:0f.0: [1106:0581] type 00 class 0x01018a
pci 0000:00:0f.0: reg 0x20: [io  0x4460-0x446f]
pci 0000:00:0f.0: legacy IDE quirk: reg 0x10: [io  0x01f0-0x01f7]
pci 0000:00:0f.0: legacy IDE quirk: reg 0x14: [io  0x03f6]
pci 0000:00:0f.0: legacy IDE quirk: reg 0x18: [io  0x0170-0x0177]
pci 0000:00:0f.0: legacy IDE quirk: reg 0x1c: [io  0x0376]

Which corresponds to: 0x8A - ISA Compatibility mode controller, supports both channels switched to PCI native mode, supports bus mastering instead of the QEMU IDE controller: 0x80 - ISA Compatibility mode-only controller, supports bus mastering

supercomputer7 on Oct 29, 2019