Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 Installation misery

nymexthegreat · n00b Joined: 31 Aug 2014 Posts: 11

Evenin' all

I've been having one heck of a time trying to install gentoo onto a new machine i built today:

Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 w/AMD-8350

I downloaded the minimal install iso as of 08/28, wrote it to a USB stick, and am able to boot. However once It's booted there is no network connectivity; this is with both the onboard Realtek 8111 chipset as well as an additional rt8169 PCI card i have. Ifconfig shows an address of 169.x.x.x. By pure luck alone it seems to occasionally obtain an address via DHCP but then there is absolutely no connectivity (i.e 95% packet loss on pings).

I've tried enabling/disabling IOMMU and a variety of other features in the BIOS but I am getting nowhere. If anyone has any experience with this I would greatly appreciate any insight.

DONAHUE · Posted: Sun Aug 31, 2014 5:45 am Post subject:

you are running net-setup?
You have determined the interface name by running

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Sun Aug 31, 2014 9:45 am Post subject:

the 169 address is one that is given (default) if it can't get a real one

"ifconfig -a" will show all interfaces (up or down)
if it shows nothing, then you probably don't have the kernel configured properly for the devices.
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Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

Try using ethtool to force the link to a slower speed. If that fixes it, it might be dud hardware. If you're lucky it might just be the cable...

kernelOfTruth · Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2014 12:38 pm Post subject:

Welcome to Gentoo, nymexthegreat !

Just choose the Linux Live System to your liking from (http://distrowatch.com/),

the most commonly used are listed there

and install gentoo from it - if you'll run into any further trouble with the Gentoo liveCD

Enjoy your stay

edit:

SystemRescueCD worked fine in combination with UEFI
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nymexthegreat · n00b Joined: 31 Aug 2014 Posts: 11

Thank you all for your responses.

If anyone else is having trouble:

Enable IOMMU in BIOS.
Edit: You may or may not need to enable the NetworkStack in BIOS.

I used the AMD64 Live DVD as the install environment
-Add the IOMMU=soft command to the linux kernel bootline (networking will NOT work without this)

Proceed as normal.

As a point of interest (i really have no idea about the implications) the IOMMU was not detected by LSPCI on the gentoo minimal install ISO but was detected by the LiveDVD - presumably this has somethign to do with it?

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2014 4:38 pm Post subject:

I had trouble with the network cards, when I turned IOMMU on (I forgot since it was a while back)
I added "iommu=pt" to the command line in grub and have had no trouble since. (pt means passthrough and is needed for some amd mb's)

I believe "soft" tells it to use software iommu, and IMO you might as well turn off iommu in the bios instead.

Edit to add: the only reason for having IOMMU on is for virtualization (qemu, etc.)
if you're not doing vm's then leave iommu off as it's not used for much else, AFAIK.
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nymexthegreat · n00b Joined: 31 Aug 2014 Posts: 11

Thanks for the info anon-moose.

Soft worked so I had just stuck with that, but I do fully intend to use the IOMMU so pt it is. I've been looking @ kernel-parameters.txt (from kernel.org) and the options dont seem to be well documented.

Did you enable anything to do with amd_iommu by chance?

DONAHUE · Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 3:54 am Post subject:

derived from pappy kernel 3.9.9 (3.16.1) now, working on fx8150 on an asrock fatal1ty moboard
zgrep -i iommu /proc/config.gz
CONFIG_GART_IOMMU=y
# CONFIG_CALGARY_IOMMU is not set
CONFIG_IOMMU_HELPER=y
# CONFIG_IOMMU_SUPPORT is not set
# CONFIG_IOMMU_DEBUG is not set
# CONFIG_IOMMU_STRESS is not set
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Anon-E-moose · Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 10:07 am Post subject:

These are my config options (dealing with IOMMU)

CONFIG_GART_IOMMU=y
# CONFIG_CALGARY_IOMMU is not set
CONFIG_IOMMU_HELPER=y
CONFIG_VFIO_IOMMU_TYPE1=m
CONFIG_IOMMU_API=y
CONFIG_IOMMU_SUPPORT=y
CONFIG_AMD_IOMMU=y
# CONFIG_AMD_IOMMU_STATS is not set
# CONFIG_INTEL_IOMMU is not set
# CONFIG_IOMMU_STRESS is not set

From the command line, I only pass the one that I mentioned earlier.

I agree the kernel parameters (especially the ones dealing with iommu) leave much to be desired as far as detail or what they mean.
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Oniryczny · Guru Joined: 01 Dec 2011 Posts: 419 Location: Poland

I don't know if my config may help but on my Asus M5A99X EVO with FX-6300 i have

chithanh · Posted: Wed Sep 03, 2014 1:38 am Post subject:

IOMMU=pt will effectively disable the IOMMU.

See also this topic for reference to the kernel bug report containing a patch to the r8169 driver.

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Wed Sep 03, 2014 9:58 am Post subject:

The problem was that without "pt" more than just the ethernet card was affected.
And there were a slew of AMD-Vi error messages from multiple devices.

From pci-dma.c
/*
* This variable becomes 1 if iommu=pt is passed on the kernel command line.
* If this variable is 1, IOMMU implementations do no DMA translation for
* devices and allow every device to access to whole physical memory. This is
* useful if a user wants to use an IOMMU only for KVM device assignment to
* guests and not for driver dma translation.
*/

And in my case and many others that I've read about the reason most use iommu is for virtualization.

I just mention it as working for me, others can make their own choices.

Edit to add: I would imagine that the DMA translation is part of the problem with some things not working without the pt flag.
As to whether it's a bios problem, inherent to AMD cpu/chipsets or something else, I don't know.
I haven't tried it since using an older version of the kernel (using 3.15.9 now)
I may test it to see if it's been fixed in the latest version.
_________________
PRIME x570-pro, 3700x, 6.1 zen kernel
gcc 13, profile 17.0 (custom bare multilib), openrc, wayland