UEFI boot and early console messages

Message

Atom2 · Post by **Atom2** » Sat May 13, 2017 11:50 am

After many attempts I have now finally succeeded in installing and booting gentoo via UEFI. The main issue I was faced with was an SAS adapter which I had crossflashed from its RAID firmware to a simple HBA firmware with adding only the BIOS rom firmware file, but missing out on the UEFI rom firmware file - but that's another story ...

Anyways, I am still struggling with an issue I seem to be unable to solve. I use grub2 to boot the system and I am also able to set the desired graphical video mode in grub. Once I have selected the boot entry and pressed the Enter-key the only thing I see on the console screen is an indication to boot the selected entry (which stems from grub2). After that the monitor does not show any messages until such time the graphics card/framebuffer kernel driver is loaded (which is around the 7 to 8 seconds mark). Only then are boot messages going to show on the console.

I have experimented with numerous combinations of framebuffers (simplefb, efi-fb, mga KMS driver for my card), grub2 settings (gfxmode, gfxpayload) and kernel settings (video=), but none appears to be able to display early boot messages:

While the desired resolutions all work both in grub and in linux, the handover from one to the other seems to stall until such time the linux kernel driver is actually activated. Around the time when the corresponding messages are shown in /var/log/dmesg, boot messages start being displayed on the console video monitor.

I am running out of ideas on how to be able to also display early boot messages on my monitor - even if they showed up in a lower resolution only.

Does a pure UEFI boot scenario (also displaying early boot messages) actually work for anybody or is this simply not possible?

Thanks Atom2

DONAHUE · Post by **DONAHUE** » Sat May 13, 2017 12:29 pm

Does a pure UEFI boot scenario (also displaying early boot messages) actually work for anybody or is this simply not possible?

Yes, works for me.
Suggest pastebin your kernel config, lspci -k, grub.cfg .

Atom2 · Post by **Atom2** » Sat May 13, 2017 2:14 pm

Hi DONAHUE,
thanks for your confirmation and your offer to help. Please do find the requested pieces of information below.

lspci -k: https://paste.pound-python.org/show/gsD ... Hn5E2pCNp/
kernel configuration: https://paste.pound-python.org/show/l9I ... gRpDMidLH/
grub.cfg: https://paste.pound-python.org/show/6gm ... 6YOfU6HzQj

I guess the hardware is pretty much obvious from the lspci -k output. Should you require anything else, please do not hesitate to ask. Many thanks in advance,

Atom2

Jaglover · Post by **Jaglover** » Sat May 13, 2017 2:18 pm

Do you have same issue when booting from SystemRescueCD?

Atom2 · Post by **Atom2** » Sat May 13, 2017 6:35 pm

Hi Jaglover,

Jaglover wrote:Do you have same issue when booting from SystemRescueCD?

It took a bit of time to create a bootable USB stick with the SystemRescueCD due to incorrect pathes in its grub configuration file (/isolinux instead of /syslinux) and thus the stick being unbootable at first ... but that's now sorted.

Interestingly enough, also the SystemRescueCD shows identical symptoms: Grub's menu shows in the correct resolution; once you start the boot process the screen goes blank and as soon as the efifb is probed and loaded (as seen in dmesg) the console spits out the following boot log messages correctly. And the resolution is again identical to the one grub's menu was showing up before.

So what do I make out of this ... and more importantly, is there a cure to show boot messages on the console right from the start of the boot process?

Thanks, Atom2

DONAHUE · Post by **DONAHUE** » Sat May 13, 2017 9:07 pm

I have no experience with your equipment so am unlikely to be of help.
Have you tried nomodeset as a kernel option? KMS used to cause problems like yours.

Atom2 · Post by **Atom2** » Sat May 13, 2017 9:52 pm

Thanks DONAHUE,
I tried that parameter, but unfortunately it didn't change anything. I'll wait and see if anybody else in the know chimes in as I consider this behaviour rather annoying and I am really out of ideas.

Thanks Atom2

DONAHUE · Post by **DONAHUE** » Sat May 13, 2017 11:50 pm

https://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/supp ... ad/?id=145 is a matrox driver from 2006 which https://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/supp ... rs/latest/ suggests may be for G200
linux-firmware provides two pieces of matrox firmware
have you tried matrox frame buffer in kernel? http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/F ... fer-HOWTO/