[ipxe-devel] Unable to boot Linux kernel for arm64 architecture

[Mark Rutland]

On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 07:48:08PM +0100, Andre wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> it's a MP30-AR1 board from Gigabyte with a X-Gene 1 SoC.
> The firmware is the latest release F01.
> 
> But as I wrote in my original post this doesn't happen with
> GRUB2-EFI, so I don't believe that it is a firmware issue.

While it may seem unlikely, I believe that it is.

Some FW [1] has been seen to erroneously disable the MMU within
ExitBootServices().

If it does this before sending a EVT_SIGNAL_EXIT_BOOT_SERVICES event,
which ipxe has registered a handler for, it could result in precisely
the issue seen here.

To my knowledge, GRUB does not register a handler for
EVT_SIGNAL_EXIT_BOOT_SERVICES, and thus would not be affected.

Thanks,
Mark.

[1] http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-arm-kernel/2017-February/484942.html