Arch Linux

maxdub432

Member

Registered: 2010-10-06

Posts: 5

Timeout mounting ARCH_201701; USB ports not working on old hardware?

Trying to install Arch on this awful old ViewSonic tablet to eke a bit more life out of it. Booting from USB since there's no optical. Main filesystem fails to mount and drops me to a recovery shell, but then my USB keyboard doesn't work. Stick boots fine in other computers; USB devices work in BIOS and Windows on this tablet. This seems to imply Arch isn't able to take control of the USB ports, but I'm not seeing any messages directly indicating this.

At the default loglevel the error I get before this is "mmc2: Got command interrupt 0x00000001 even though no command operation was in progress" followed by a dump from sdhci. Verbose logging does have some entries about finding USB devices up to number 3 with ehci-pci, but I'm honestly not really sure what I should be looking for or what to do about it.

Is this a case of "sorry, your crappy old hardware just isn't supported" or is there something else that I should try, or some info I can copy down to file a driver bug report?

Thanks!

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 29,534

Website

Re: Timeout mounting ARCH_201701; USB ports not working on old hardware?

If it's a tablet (and not of the stone variety) I'm pretty sure the hardware is not too old for arch linux.

My suspicion is that it may be a 32-bit efi system common on windows tablets which is known to be problematic.  There are many workarounds for these devices on these forums and some in the wiki.  Generally arch can be installed on them, but not trivially or at least not with the unmodified installation iso.

But for any specifics, we'd need to know about the actual hardware beyond just the brand name.

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"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

maxdub432

Member

Registered: 2010-10-06

Posts: 5

Re: Timeout mounting ARCH_201701; USB ports not working on old hardware?

EDIT: So it's pretty easy to use grub-mkstandalone to generate a 32-bit EFI loader (and I rebuilt the stick with GPT partitioning). Now the tablet will EFI boot to the grub menu, which has an entry pointed to the files in boot/i686, but selecting it just leaves me with a blank screen. Apparently this is (or was) a common problem, but everybody and their mother has a different solution? I would assume a total lack of output is a graphical problem, but neither nomodeset nor set gfxpayload=text helps. Is getting EFI boot working definitely what we need? Did I make the loader wrong? My grub.cfg looks like this:

insmod part_gpt
insmod part_msdos
insmod fat
insmod efi_gop
insmod efi_uga
insmod video_bochs
insmod video_cirrus
insmod font

if loadfont "${prefix}/fonts/unicode.pf2" ; then
  insmod gfxterm
  set gfxmode="1024x768x32;auto"
  terminal_input console
  terminal_output gfxterm
fi

menuentry "Arch Linux archiso" {
  set gfxpayload=keep
  #set gfxpayload=text
  #search --no-floppy --set=root --label ARCH_201701
  set root=(hd0,gpt1)
  linux /arch/boot/i686/vmlinuz archisobasedir=arch archisolabel=ARCH_201701 add_efi_memmap #nomodeset
  initrd /arch/boot/intel_ucode.img
  initrd /arch/boot/i686/archiso.img
}

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Hey, thanks for the quick reply! That makes sense; if I understand right this stick should be bootable in EFI-compatible or legacy mode, but selecting EFI boot doesn't actually do anything, it just sits in the BIOS. EFI and all its vagaries have always been sort of confusing to me; I've been using Arch for a decade now and mostly know my way around but I am unequivocally not a coder.

Here's what I know about the tablet:
ViewSonic VS14406 "Viewpad 10pi"
Intel Atom Z670 CPU, Intel SM35 Express Chipset, Intel GMA600 Graphics
AMBIOS tells me it's meant to support UEFI 2.1

And this is from Arch Hardware Detection:
Intel Moorestown USB Controller: PCI ID 8086:0806 (module unknown)
2 Intel Moorestown SD Host Controllers: PCI IDs 8086:0807&0808 (module sdhci_pci)

What-all else do we need to look at?

Thanks again!

Last edited by maxdub432 (2017-01-26 05:06:28)