Arch Linux

yell!

Member

Registered: 2011-05-16

Posts: 48

Alix 3D3 headless pc not booting anymore since kernel update

Hi experts,
I need an help to troubleshoot what happened to my PC Engines ALIX 3D3 (I have a 3C3 but is quite the same).
The story is a bit complicated: I was working abroad in 2014-2015 and I was administering my archlinux installation over SSH. It was an hobbyst home server, set up to have fun with archlinux. One day I did an update (I was using LTS kernels) and I broke it.
Now I am at home and I have hardware access
I would like to set into operation my home server. I tried with latest archlinux and ubuntu iot images but no luck.
I think that some parameters were changed some time ago and the support to this motherboard (that uses an AMD Geode LX800) is now broken.
Here the topic on this forum about archlinux and this CPU: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=147061
I would like to quote some important information from that topic:

The Geode LX 800 is an i586 processor.

Which is wrong. Yes, the Geode lacks of the NOPL instruction, but this instruction never was part of Intel's i686 specification. Unfortunately, it became an unofficial standard. But as it seems, new versions of binutils or gcc or whatever realized that fact and stopped building NOPLs into executables, because ARCH i686 works on the Geode (using arch's November 2012 iso).

I have just installed Arch Linux on my ALIX Board (3d3) with a Geode LX 800 processor. The only things you have to take care of is to press TAB at the installer's boot screen and add the option "arch=i686", and set "Architecture = i686" in your pacman.conf. That's it.

I just found a clonezilla image of the working system dated 2014-05-04 so at this date the LTS kernel was ok.
I can fire up this image but then what?
Any ideas on how can I proceed?

Thanks

mich41

Member

Registered: 2012-06-22

Posts: 796

Re: Alix 3D3 headless pc not booting anymore since kernel update

I suggest connecting to the serial console or VGA and checking what's going on in there.