attempting to boot Dell PowerEdge R710 with uEFI still panics with 2020-08-20-LATEST

[nacho Lariguet]

On Sat, 22 Aug 2020 11:19:40 +0300
"karu.pruun" <karu.pruun at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have an ASUS Prime TRX40-Pro mobo with Ryzen Threadripper 3970X and
> it crashes with the same message when booting with 'pure' UEFI. And it
> boots fine when booting with BIOS emulation (enable 'CSM
> (Compatibility Support Module)').

Sadly these servers have no options other than BIOS vs uEFI.
See attached screenshot please.

> However, on this mobo there is also a way to boot with UEFI when parts
> of the CMS module are enabled. For this, I enable the CSM module; then
> a sub-menu appears which enables further configuration. It gives the
> following type of selections for various device classes:
> 
> [UEFI and Legacy OPROM] [Legacy OPROM only] [UEFI only]
> 
> Tweaking those I managed to boot via UEFI with the video is recognized
> with the EFI buffer and a higher resolution than what BIOS would give.
> I can't remember exactly which one I enabled, but I can check and
> report next week when I get back to office.
> 
> So you might be able to make it work if your mobo has similar options.

Last night, with what I learned so far booting the BSDs, I was able to
successfully boot this server with freeBSD 11.4 (and even with 12.1) via
uEFI. With the following loader options:

- set kern.kms_columns=-1
- gop set 0

I ended up booting without any problems at 1920x1200 with 240x75 on all
virtual terminals (including vtty0). Yes, I know, this is vt not syscons,
so I can't compare with dragonFly, but it is UTF-8-aware out of the box
which for me is fantastic :) ... I think dragonFly is the only BSD
without a native UTF-8 system console right now, am I right ?

Loading radeonkms after booting works as expected too.

I want to run dragonFly and not freeBSD, but given the persistent issues
popping up with this hardware/software combo, I am now seriously
considering to switch to freeBSD/ZFS instead of DF/HAMMER2. These servers
are topped with storage/memory and I badly want them running soon and not
sitting iddle for testing purposes. I do not have other hardware :(
  
> Peeter
> 
> --
> 
> On Sat, Aug 22, 2020 at 12:15 AM nacho Lariguet <lariguet at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > panic: alst_radix_free: freeing free block
> >
> > Please, check attached image for more details.
> > Booted with loader defaults with liveCD 2020-08-20 LATEST.
> > Nothing was changed.
> >
> > I was hoping that commit faeb2db (hack the DMAP size) could finally make my Dell server boot.
> >
> > If anyone is successfully booting R710s (or the like) via uEFI please tell me so.
> > I think after almost two years attempting to run dragonFly on these machines I am giving up.
> >
> > At this point I do have dragonFly manually installed and configured (with customs scripts)
> > running on a Lenovo ThinkCentre M715q via uEFI and it works without any issues so far. This
> > started as a test-bed to learn manual installations to later deploy it on the Dell servers.
> >
> > Besides booting the PowerEdge servers with BIOS (instead of uEFI) I ran out of options :(

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