[MinnowBoard] Headless Operation

[John 'Warthog9' Hawley]

Basically there's two ways to solve what you are hitting (which is
basically that your UEFI on your board doesn't know where to boot to).

1) jump into the firmware (type exit at the shell prompt) and change the
default boot order:
	http://wiki.minnowboard.org/UEFI#Change_Boot_Order

2) add a startup.nsh to your UEFI partition that will default to running
the appropriate boot program on the UEFI partition (like bootx64.efi) in
the off chance it falls through to the boot shell.

You could manually boot it as well, but that doesn't seem useful to you.

Slightly more detailed, the reason this happens, is by changing the
devices present can, possibly, confuse the UEFI system on what it should
boot, so it defaults to going to the shell.

- John

On 11/26/2016 07:16 PM, eviljoel wrote:
> Hello Jon and Michael,
> 
> OK, I kinda figured it out (but not completely). It wasn't the display
> that was keeping the Minnowboard from booting, it was the lack of a
> keyboard. More specifically, the lack of a device in the USB 2.0 slot. I
> suspect this is related to the fact that I am booting the operating
> system from the USB 3.0 slot. Having no device in the USB 2.0 slot
> causes the boot loader to not find the boot device.
> 
> To get around this issue, I'm just going to plug an old flash drive into
> the USB 2.0 slot when I'm not using the keyboard. That said, if anyone
> has any ideas about how to get the firmware to boot the USB 3.0 device
> without a USB 2.0 device, I'm all ears.
> 
> Unfortunately, even with the flash drive in the USB 2.0 slot, I'm having
> a little trouble getting the device to boot consistently. I've had it
> abruptly stop about 3 times with the following screen (over serial):
> 
> UEFI Interactive Shell v2.1
> EDK II
> UEFI v2.50 (EDK II, 0x00010000)
> Mapping table
>      BLK0: Alias(s):
>           PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x14,0x0)/USB(0x1,0x0)
> Press ESC in 1 seconds to skip startup.nsh or any other key to continue.
> Shell>
> 
> I also sometimes get this screen:
> 
> UEFI Interactive Shell v2.1
> EDK II
> UEFI v2.50 (EDK II, 0x00010000)
> map: No mapping found.
> Press ESC in 1 seconds to skip startup.nsh or any other key to continue.
> Shell>
> 
> I tend to get this "error" when the devices has been powered off for
> several minutes. I'm currently researching UEFI boot options to see if
> there is something I can do. Unfortunately, I'm finding that UEFI
> documentation is hard to come by.
> 
> BTW, thanks for the serial port tip. That helped a lot.
> 
> Thanks,
> eviljoel
> 
> On 11/26/2016 01:04 AM, eviljoel wrote:
>> Hello John,
>>
>> Good to hear someone has it working headlessly. Can you tell me the
>> version of Linux you are using? Can you also tell me your firmware version?
>>
>> I'm trying to run it headless over SSH. If I run into problems, I don't
>> mind plugging it into a monitor from time to time, but generally I was
>> hoping to run it without a monitor.
>>
>> I'll likely try using the serial console later this weekend. It will be
>> a good way to see if Linux is even starting.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> eviljoel
>>
>> On 11/25/2016 11:27 PM, John 'Warthog9' Hawley wrote:
>>> On 11/25/2016 08:18 PM, eviljoel wrote:
>>>> Greetings,
>>>>
>>>> I've been trying to run the Minnowboard headless with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
>>>> with the latest Minnowboard firmware. On subsequent boots with a monitor
>>>> plugged in, the system logs record no boot attempts while headless. It
>>>> appears that the Minnowboard is not booting Ubuntu or Ubuntu does not
>>>> get far enough into the boot process to start logging. Plugging in the
>>>> monitor after the Minnowboard has been powered on does not result in any
>>>> video output. I'm starting to think the Minnowboard is not capable of
>>>> headless operation.
>>>>
>>>> So what's the story? Is the Minnowboard capable of headless operation?
>>>> So far, Google hasn't turned up anything but I can't imagine I'm the
>>>> first one to run into this issue.
>>>
>>> I run the board headless, using only the serial console, quite a bit -
>>> so it is possible.  Not sure how you are trying to run headless, but the
>>> firmware will output information to the serial port, and assuming you
>>> have your Linux distro setup correctly (usually by adding
>>> `console=ttyS0,115200 console=tty0` to your kernel boot parameters, but
>>> I'm unfamiliar with how Ubuntu does it for sure), you should get serial
>>> console data out.  Not entirely sure what you are seeing, but if you are
>>> running headless can you confirm your setup with your serial port?
>>>
>>> - John 'Warthog9' Hawley
>>>
>>
>