Good morning Thomas, your suggestions are very appreciated!
(Btw, I found a page in the Debian wiki that warns not to "FrankenDebian" https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian ...) On Wed, 2025-09-03 at 21:16:42 +0200, Thomas Lange wrote: > Hi Steffen, > > if I got it correctly, you want to do a FAI installation on this > Cavium ThunderX based Gigabyte R120-T35. In the long run, yes. (It's been a backup machine for another server for a long time, but it staying behind recent developments puts that at serious risk.) Before I can start with that, I need to find a combination of kernels and kernel command-line parameters that work. My latest working combo up to now is - Buster's 4.19.0-xy with a rather boring BOOT_IMAGE=/ROOT/debian@/boot/vmlinuz-4.19.0-25-arm64 root=ZFS=rpool/ROOT/debian \ ro quiet console=tty0 console=ttyS1,115200n8 (yes, there's ZFS involved, but even that behaved nicely until here) > https://fai-project.org/fai-cd/fai-small_6.2.5-arm64.iso Fetched it, Balena-etched it onto a USB keydrive. > It includes a much newer kernel, but hey an easy way to just give it a > try. There's always a chance that newer kernels iron out bugs in older ones :) > Then I can offer an ARM64 nfsroot at > https://fai-project.org/download/misc/ I also got nfsroot-generic-arm64_6.2.5_6.11.10+bpo-arm64-16k.tar.zst from that place, I suppose it'd match the iso image next to it, bearing the same creation date? > Maybe you can install an old 4.19 kernel into this nfsroot and then > try to recreate the initrd using dpkg-reconfigure dracut. I'd always prefer to use PXE (which - with ISC DHCP and TFTPD HPA - works nicely even on this box) but will give USB a try, just will need to rearrange things a bit in my office (to host the machine - I refuse to spend hours and hours in the basement room for testing this one). I'll let everyone know what I find. In the meantime, I found a number of boot flags, reasonable-looking ones as well as rather esoteric ones - in the end the ones which boot the machine are the right ones :) Thanks so far, best regards Steffen
