Rant: AMD Bios Pissing me Off

[FastTurtle]

It looks as though the 1.2.0.8 Agesa is not stable enough on my system. Most of the times, it fails to see the drives connected to the LSI HBA card that's set with the Bios Boot Option. I'm not sure what is going on but the card should come up first, which would then allow the bios to recognize the drives connected to it.

What's annoying is that most times it does and then as soon as windows is ran, it refuses to pay attention to the card and boots Windows in Fast Boot Mode even though disabled in Bios so I'm going to downgrade to the 1.2.0.6 Ageasa versions, which is a major roll back on my system bios because that at least worked correctly and it supports my CPU - 5800x3d. Any earlier versions were problematic so I don't want to go much below that as I'd have to reinstall my 3600 as the earlier versions simply don't support the 5xxx series of CPU's. Could be wrong as others have pointed out that they work, just not all of their features are accessible in the bios.

Note that I may only respond once a week or so if anyone is interested.
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AsRock B550 Phantom Gaming 4
128GB 3200 Mhz memory
4x 4TB Sata - 2x 2TB Sata SSD - 4x 450GB SaS - 3x 900GB SaS - 72GB SaS for Boot
LSI 9211-8i in HBA mode for all of the SaS drives
Radeon 6800 (Non XT) for GPU

[FastTurtle]

At least the 1.0.6 Ageasa is working with my CPU and System. Much nicer to see the HBA Firmware come up as it's supposed, even when booting into windows. It also seems to be a bit faster. Of course, I've lost the ability to set a custom Thermal Limit or even use the Curve Optimizer. Heck I can't even turn PBO On/Off. The option isn't there but it's at least booting a bit faster. Now if AMD would finally solve the Memory training issue that takes so long: why does it need to do so if at the JDECC default of 2133? Read the SPD info and use them. Should be stable - that's what the standard is for. Sure it wont be the fastest but it should at least boot very quickly.

Now I'm having to do a clean install of Gentoo but after testing to see if the bios sees the efi/esp partition - not it's not the first - I'm having to repartition things with the blasted efi/esp as the first partition. Not sure what the AMD devs were thinking because as long as it's an EFI/ESP partition with the required format, it should be seen by the bios. Just another Pain in the Arse issue but it's solvable.
_________________
AsRock B550 Phantom Gaming 4
128GB 3200 Mhz memory
4x 4TB Sata - 2x 2TB Sata SSD - 4x 450GB SaS - 3x 900GB SaS - 72GB SaS for Boot
LSI 9211-8i in HBA mode for all of the SaS drives
Radeon 6800 (Non XT) for GPU

[shadowless]

Did you disable Fast Startup on the Windows software side?

[FastTurtle]

Never had Fast Startup enabled - too many problems with it. Also don't have the fast start enabled in the bios and have a 5 second delay.

Seems that the card will need it's firmware updated with the UEFI upgrade. Supposedly that will fix the issues.

On another note mirroselect decided to break make.conf - emerge -p world keeps throwing an "unexpected end of file '=' line##" in make conf.

The only solution I can think of is to rename make.conf so I can still read it and recreated it by hand with the basic information. If it continues giving me an issue, I'll put off the move until I have free time again to deal with it, which is most likely six months or longer due to work.
_________________
AsRock B550 Phantom Gaming 4
128GB 3200 Mhz memory
4x 4TB Sata - 2x 2TB Sata SSD - 4x 450GB SaS - 3x 900GB SaS - 72GB SaS for Boot
LSI 9211-8i in HBA mode for all of the SaS drives
Radeon 6800 (Non XT) for GPU

[FastTurtle]

I should be able to replace the borked make.conf with the one from the stage3 archive that I was able to extract with 7zip. Checked it's format and such and it's correct and yes, it's now in the root of the flash drive so all I need to do is copy it to the install drives. Hopefully, the issue isn't with portage itself because if it is, it means I'll have to extract the stag3 file again and overwrite everything. Not sure if I can protect the portage cache so it'll be able to simply rebuild from the downloaded files instead of installing from the cache if that's where the problem lies.
_________________
AsRock B550 Phantom Gaming 4
128GB 3200 Mhz memory
4x 4TB Sata - 2x 2TB Sata SSD - 4x 450GB SaS - 3x 900GB SaS - 72GB SaS for Boot
LSI 9211-8i in HBA mode for all of the SaS drives
Radeon 6800 (Non XT) for GPU

[Hu]

Downloaded distfiles can be preserved simply by not deleting the directory in which they reside. No special handling is required.

[keet]

I have an ASRock B550-Plus, and it frequently (well, once every month or two when I reboot it for updates) fails to detect my hard drive, requiring me to boot it from a flash drive and reinstall GRUB to set the boot option in E.F.I. -- oddly, even though the U.E.F.I. doesn't detect the hard drive, the booted Linux environment does.

[FastTurtle]

Keet: Sounds like a Bios Issue. Never seen that but then I just had to roll back to the 1.0.6 Ageasa as the latest 1.0.8 isn't stable with Linux for some reason.

Hu: Not sure where they're being stored as the wiki isn't clear. The one I'm most familiar with is /var/portage/disfiles but that's being phased out and I'd have to look at the wiki again for the other location.

One thing I'm doing to make life much easier in the future is saving a copy of critical config files such as make.conf, fstab and such on the flash drive with the minimal installation. Plenty of room and text files don't take much space to begin with. What it does is ensure I don't have to remember what I did to get my build - used to do that long ago and it's not a bad habit. I even keep a syslog file on the flash drive along with in /root so I can figure out how I got there. Good Maps are a thing of beauty but mine are more like the drawings of a 3 year old at times. It's a Cat mom!
_________________
AsRock B550 Phantom Gaming 4
128GB 3200 Mhz memory
4x 4TB Sata - 2x 2TB Sata SSD - 4x 450GB SaS - 3x 900GB SaS - 72GB SaS for Boot
LSI 9211-8i in HBA mode for all of the SaS drives
Radeon 6800 (Non XT) for GPU