I believe the board and APU came out around 2014. The cpu is an AMD AM1.
The mother board is the gigabyte AM1M-S2H.
On the BIOS column it says: 1 x 32 Mbit flash. Does that mean that the firmware is 32-bit? I’m not sure…
Just to clarify, my desktop machine did detect that the usb could be booted via UEFI or via legacy boot. I could either choose to boot guixSD via UEFI or via legacy. I could only get it to boot properly the legacy way. When I chose the UEFI
option, it hanged.
BUT to be sure, I entered my bios and now my computer will only boot in UEFI mode. When I tell my computer to boot via the usb (using UEFI and booting GuixSD), it fails to boot at some point. Here’s some of the last entries:
snd_hda_codec_realtex hdaudioC1D0:
….
[drm] radeon kernel modesetting enabled
….
AMD IOMMUv2 driver by Joerg Roedel
…
CU CPU: cores=4 id_base=0
…
found cache entry in CRAT table with processor_id=1
...
Creating topology SYSFS entries
Finished initializing topology ret=0
kfd kfd: Initialized module
fb: switching to radeondrmfb from EFI VGA
Then it hangs and does nothing more. I’m assuming that it is has something to do with the APU, but I don’t know. Actually, it could be that Arch Linux uses a vanilla kernel. Perhaps the linux-libre kernel doesn’t ship with some certain needed
proprietary firmware…actually I’m reading online on several places (online) that this is a problem with mode setting the radeon driver. If I change the grub command line to disable modesetting, then I may be able to boot properly. The problem is that I
don’t see grub anywhere in my boot process.
After I turn on the machine, I see a splash image of Gigabyte logo, then I immediately see my boot options. Arch Linux, or reboot into firmware. I can’t seem to figure out how to get to the grub command prompt to tell it that I want to boot
the usb via UEFI, and disable mode setting…..I think the reason why I do not see grub loading, is because I am using systemd-boot and not grub. hahah. No wonder I can’t read the grub command prompt. So now I need to uninstall systemd-boot, boot via grub,
then I’ll be able to get to the grub command prompt.
Ok, I booted Arch Linux. uninstalled systemd-boot. Installed grub. Now I am trying to boot the usb stick via UEFI. systemd-boot was smart enough to realize that I had a usb stick that wanted to boot. Default grub doesn’t seem to be…That’s
ok. I can do this manually. I go to a grub command prompt, and am I trying to get the usb to boot. Chainloading it didn’t work.
aka: set root=(hd0,gpt5)
chainloader +1
boot
So now I am trying to get grub to boot the usb stick to boot via UEFI. Since I’ve disabled booting in legacy mode in my bios, it should boot via UEFI.
set root=(hd1,gpt5)
linux (hd1,gpt1)/vmlinuz-linux rw root=/dev/sda5 nomodeset
initrd (hd1,gtp1)/initramfs-linux.img
boot
gpt5 on the usb stick is the root. Label “my-root.” and gpt1 is a fat filesystem. So I guess I’m choosing the right partitions. though is /dev/sda right???
When I try booting this: /dev/sda5 is mounted cleanly (is that the same thing as hd1,gpt5 ?) but I get an error message: /sbin/init does not exist. Bailing out, you are on your own. Good luck.
And now I’m in a rootfs prompt.
I’ll keep trying to figure out how to book the usb stick via grub….