Re: Problems booting NetBSD/Xen on Intel NUC 12 Extreme w/ i9-12900

[Johan Stenstam <johani%johani.org@localhost>]

Hi again,

> On 11 May 2023, at 19:46, Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, May 11, 2023 at 12:27:03PM +0200, Johan Stenstam wrote:

>> So my interpretation of this is that there seem to be multiple issues at hand:
>> 
>> 1. There is some sort of problem with handing over the console from Xen to the DOM0.
>> 
>> 2. There is some other sort of problem with the DOM0 not booting successfully due to problems with the console.
>> 
>> It is possible that these two things are actually the same, eg. the handover problem cause the DOM0 to crash, but I see no easy way to tell whether the DOM0 crashes immediately or if it becomes unhappy later on. 
> 
> I suspect the two are the same issue. When NetBSD tries to use the VGA console
> it will try to configure a GPU-specific video driver.
> What is your VGA adapter ? 

It’s the built in graphics in the NUC 12. It presents itself to a NetBSD GENERIC kernel as a genfb0.

> Also maybe Xen set it up in a mode that NetBSD can't use
> 
>> 
>> What would have been nice would be an alternative like ?console=none?, as in ?I know there is no working console, just send the output to the log so that I can examine it later?, but I cannot find one.
> 
> No there's no such thing

Alas, but that workaround that Matthias Petermann found helps a bit for the moment.

>> Things I will try this evening when I get back to where the box is:
>> 
>> 1.Try to speed up the serial console output a la: ?...console=com0,115200? to get away from the ultra sluggishness of the current serial console, which is likely 9600 baud.
> 
> I don't think this will change anything as this is not really a serial
> console. 

You were right; no change.

>> 2. Right now Xen puts the console in some sort of high resolution mode (I have at least 100 rows of very tiny characters) while NetBSD/GENERIC runs the console as a more normal lower resolution text terminal. I?ll see if it is possible to get Xen to use the same to make the handover easier. 
> 
> Yes, with the vga= boot argument it should be possible.

I’ve tried a bunch of different vga= arguments (except just the vga=ask that Matthias discovered), but none of them change anything. I.e. even things like vga=text-80x24 (which should set it up as a text console) does nothing, I still get the extremely high resolution console for Xen.

Regards,
Johan