Installing 11-CURRENT on Lenovo u530

[jgrim]

I am attempting to install FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE from a USB thumb drive on a Lenovo u530 laptop. The UEFI boot menu finds the thumb drive and attempts to boot, but it cannot find the root filesystem. I am stuck at the mountroot prompt.

When I type ? at the mountroot prompt, the thumb drive is found at da0s1 with the same gptid as in the umass0 output, so that's encouraging. I've tried the entering a manual root spec at the prompt as suggested, with the following output.

mountroot> ufs:/dev/da0s1a
Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/da0s1a []...
mountroot: waiting for device /dev/da0s1a ...
usbd_setup_device_desc: getting device descriptor at addr 5 failed, USB_ERR_TIMEOUT
Mounting from ufs:/dev/da0s1a failed with error 19

This is interesting because in the output from umass0 above this, it looks like it's detected on addr 2 (or is this a different addr than referenced by usbd_setup_device_desc?)

umass0:  <Generic        ,    . USB2.0 Card Reader, class 0/0, rev 2.00/1.00, addr 2> on usbus0

I've tried several different USB drives, all with the same result. I've verified the installation image I am using. The image was written to the USB drive with dd.

Any ideas on where to go next?

 

[tobik@]

What image are you using? Have you tried one of the UEFI images? And is it /dev/da0s1a or /dev/da0s1?

Isn't the Lenovo U530 a Haswell-based notebook? If you want to use a graphical environment you might be out of luck, because FreeBSD does not support Haswell graphics atm (see Thread intel-chip-problem-with-freebsd.50434).

 

[jgrim]

I am using FreeBSD-10.1-RELEASE-amd64-uefi-memstick.img. I've tried both da0s1 and da0s1a at memroot> and neither worked.

Aw shoot, it is a Haswell notebook and I would like a graphical environment. Perhaps I'll give 11-CURRENT a try... Failing that, it's back to Slackware or Arch Linux :-(

 

[tobik@]

Should 11-CURRENT not work for you, try some of the other BSDs first. I believe DragonFlyBSD has support for Haswell graphics. I don't know about the others. But come back to FreeBSD later in any case

 

[jgrim]

I'll give Dragonfly a try too. I will be running FreeBSD on my desktop in any case, so I will still be around.

I just tried 11-CURRENT and it has pretty much the same behavior from the USB installer. Still can't mount the root.

 

[jgrim]

Yay, success! The USB drive now boots and I can try things out.
The issue, as usual, was me. I was writing the image to /dev/sdc1 (a partition) instead of /dev/sdc (the raw disk).

I will now attempt to install...

 

[jgrim]

I can boot 11-CURRENT successfully and the installer starts, but I get a constant stream of USB_ERR_TIMEOUT messages.

usb_setup_device_desc: getting device descriptor at addr 10 failed, USB_ERR_TIMEOUT

I found this thread https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/error-usb_err_timeout.45448/ and this bug https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=188403 which sound similar to what I'm experiencing.

I've tried set hw.usb.xhci.xhci_port_route=-1 at the boot prompt, but it didn't make any difference.

 

[jgrim]

Operator error strikes again! This works from the boot prompt to get rid of the endless USB error messages.

# set hw.usb.xhci.xhci_port_route=-1
# boot kernel

Now the installation program runs fine and I have installed the base system and done the post-install configuration.

zzz put's the hardware to sleep, but it will wake to a black screen (Haswell problem?). Closing the lid blanks the screen and opening the lid restores it just fine.

Once I get my network connection working, I will start installing ports and perform more in depth tests.