System no longer boots after using Bare Metal Appliance Store to install Debian Unstable

Hello,

After I use the baremetal-deploy debian-unstable /dev/nvme0n1 the Ten64 no longer boots, instead I end up with a prompt showing =>.

To get back to a working system I seem to need to reflash the recovery firmware from the sdcard.

I’m using 11-June-2021 firmware from Index of /pub/traverse/ls1088firmware/firmware-builds/latest/

Any idea what is going on?

Thanks!

Tim ‘mithro’ Ansell

I was able to get the system to work again via using flash.sh in the recovery image and then it seemed to successfully boot the Debian Unstable system on /dev/nvme0n1.

I think this is because there was no environment saved on the flash before hand, and the baremetal-deploy will write two U-Boot variables for the network mode setting (depending on what combination of settings the target distribution is known to support)

I’ll see if I can add detection to the recovery firmware so the U-Boot environment can’t be touched if it’s empty.

The recovery firmware in v0.8.6 fixes this issue.

(You can also download the recovery.itb file from here and manually update )

It will refuse to set environment variables if the U-Boot environment appears to blank/missing or corrupted:

$ mtd erase ubootenv
$ baremetal-deploy traverse-openwrt-arm64 /dev/nvme0n1
...
ERROR: The U-Boot environment on flash is missing or corrupted
Not setting the management mode variables (gbemode,sfpmode) because of this
Reboot your system and use these u-boot commands to get back to a normal state:
env default -a && saveenv

Separately ./flash.sh now prompts to reset and save the environment on next boot, so the situation with an unsaved environment is less likely to occur.