Another X370 Killer SLI NVMe question

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   This follows on a thread about a NVMe question for this motherboard.

I set up this computer originally, with a SATA SSD (/dev/sda) and a hard disk (/dev/sdb).  The intention was to set up the SSD for a friend, and then send him the SSD to boot his system.  I set up the SATA SSD with just  the two devices in the case.  Since then, I have installed the NVMe SSD that I had meant to put in this system.

I am running Linux, a variation on Debian called Devuan.

I am on a farm, and weather affects what a person does.  :-)  I got a bunch of rain, and so I have more time indoors.

About the time I installed the NVMe SSD, I also upgraded he UEFI/BIOS.  The 4.60 version mentioned upgrades for NVMe, and so that is the version I have installed.

After a couple of tries, I have a version of Devuan linux installed onto the NVMe SSD in more than 1 partition.  The NVMe SSd was partitioned using gdisk as a GPT device, with a EFI partition and a pseudo MBR thing (the recommendation from Rod Smith, the author of gdisk).

Hitting F2 after booting, or hitting F11, I am presented with a list of  partitions I can boot.  Some I can choose as UEFI or as legacy.  With respect to this NVMe installation, the only option I am given is legacy.

I have tried adjusting the UEFI/BIOS to disable legacy, and as a result it does not show me the NVMe SSD as an option for booting.

Do I need an older UEFI/BIOS to do this?  A newer one?  A Beta UEFI/BIOS?  Some other magic?

Thanks.

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fortran Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Newbie Joined: 11 Jun 2018 Location: Canada Status: Offline Points: 8	Post Options Post Reply Quote fortran Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Topic: Another X370 Killer SLI NVMe question Posted: 11 Jun 2018 at 12:19pm
	This follows on a thread about a NVMe question for this motherboard. I set up this computer originally, with a SATA SSD (/dev/sda) and a hard disk (/dev/sdb). The intention was to set up the SSD for a friend, and then send him the SSD to boot his system. I set up the SATA SSD with just the two devices in the case. Since then, I have installed the NVMe SSD that I had meant to put in this system. I am running Linux, a variation on Debian called Devuan. I am on a farm, and weather affects what a person does. :-) I got a bunch of rain, and so I have more time indoors. About the time I installed the NVMe SSD, I also upgraded he UEFI/BIOS. The 4.60 version mentioned upgrades for NVMe, and so that is the version I have installed. After a couple of tries, I have a version of Devuan linux installed onto the NVMe SSD in more than 1 partition. The NVMe SSd was partitioned using gdisk as a GPT device, with a EFI partition and a pseudo MBR thing (the recommendation from Rod Smith, the author of gdisk). Hitting F2 after booting, or hitting F11, I am presented with a list of partitions I can boot. Some I can choose as UEFI or as legacy. With respect to this NVMe installation, the only option I am given is legacy. I have tried adjusting the UEFI/BIOS to disable legacy, and as a result it does not show me the NVMe SSD as an option for booting. Do I need an older UEFI/BIOS to do this? A newer one? A Beta UEFI/BIOS? Some other magic? Thanks.

pcwolf Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Newbie Joined: 06 Jan 2018 Location: Yorktown VA Status: Offline Points: 27	Post Options Post Reply Quote pcwolf Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 12 Jun 2018 at 7:50am
	Greetings. I am running the same X370 board with a Ryzen 1700X, a Samsung 960 EVO NVME drive, a couple of WD hard drives, GTX 1060 video. I installed Manjaro Linux on the NVME in one partition with /home in another partition. I installed it with Legacy support, and when GRUB updates it finds and lists my Windows 10 partition on one of the hard drives as a boot option. I believe I installed the Windows using UEFI before I put the NVME drive into the M.2. slot, then followed with Linux legacy. UEFI / Legacy is not any option listed on the GRUB boot list. It just works. Whichever operating system booted last is the default boot when the boot menu timeouts after five seconds. My BIOS looks the same as yours does if I use "DEL" to boot into it. I think UEFI is just an unnecessary complication to avoid the anarchic historic MBR requirement in the first few bytes of the drive and "boot anywhere" In my opinion, allowing GRUB to manage things is much easier. Hope this helps, I'll be happy to answer any questions if you have some. -Phil
	pcwolf Man out standing in his field

fortran Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Newbie Joined: 11 Jun 2018 Location: Canada Status: Offline Points: 8	Post Options Post Reply Quote fortran Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 12 Jun 2018 at 10:02am
	I am running this with a Ryzen 1600, with the Samsung 960 EVO. The SATA SSD is also a Samsung. I think my next step is to save a copy of what I have now (which is GPT/UEFI based), wipe out the partitioning, and set things up to install Linux to a MBR disk. Maybe the UEFI system needs to see something boot from a NVMe SSD, before it allows that NVMe device to boot UEFI? The hard disk in this machine is 1TB, and very little is partitioned. Maybe I just save existing as filesystem based and image? Well, image that is bz2 compressed. I started from a custom/experimental Refracta LiveDVD which had NVMe support. It "wants" me to use grub. I've worked a bit with rEFInd lately. The thing is to find something that works. I've got 6 machines on my LAN, all using amd64 cores with AMD GPUs. It would be nice to minimize the differences between machines. I don't have M$ running on any machine. But eventually I should have various kinds of RPi on the LAN and Arduino, so I can handle differences. Most of my reason for GPT is big disks. UEFI seems to be just bells and whistles. I would rather not waste kWhr with fancy coloured LEDs running all the time. Especially if eventually I put in enough solar panels to run the computers (and more stuff?) off that. But, I have some big data projects in mind, and at some point getting disks too big for MBR will become normal. What UEFI/BIOS version are you running?

pcwolf Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Newbie Joined: 06 Jan 2018 Location: Yorktown VA Status: Offline Points: 27	Post Options Post Reply Quote pcwolf Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 13 Jun 2018 at 11:22am
	I stayed with 3.40 for a while but my 8x2 Corsair CMU16GX4M2C3200C16 were sold as rated 3200, so I gradually upgraded through each BIOS until I arrived at the 4.63 beta version now. I was stuck with 2933 but now have it stable at 3066 with no other tweaks. I believe I used the Asrock XMP and not the AMD tweaker option. I only reboot now when Manjaro rolls out a weekly 4.14 update. I read Linux forums to install the troublesome WIN first to HDD found with stock BIOS. Then I installed Linux from live CD which offered the NVME as an installation option. Boosted it to the top of the boot order in UEFI BIOS and never looked back. If it matters, my boot NVME is in the upper M2 slot, right below the Intel wireless card. I am just a nerd geeking my home machine. Built a new house with buried Cat 6 to a structured media cabinet, Synology NAS, and IP cameras monitoring at all four corners. I also crunch numbers 24x7x365 with BOINC. -Phil
	pcwolf Man out standing in his field

fortran Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Newbie Joined: 11 Jun 2018 Location: Canada Status: Offline Points: 8	Post Options Post Reply Quote fortran Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 15 Jun 2018 at 4:34am
	I gave up on M$ long ago. I run a lot of BOINC jobs, and I plan to start doing my own MPI or BOINC stuff in the future. Once I get this computer working, I will have 46 amd64 cores running BOINC jobs. I think I have the correct NVMe slot, right by/in slot 1? Anyway, I saved what I had to tarballs and stdout output on another disk. I then reformatted the NVMe to MBR and installed from the brand new Devuan-Ascii-2.0 install DVD. The UEFI/BIOS lets me boot the NVMe as legacy, and up pops the new Devuan-Ascii. Reboot again, go into the UEFI/BIOS, and it still won't let me choose to UEFI boot the NVMe. I restore the UEFI defaults, and reboot again. Still the UEFI/BIOS will not let me designate NVMe as UEFI. So, I guess next up is to repartition the NVMe as GPT and put everything back, and see if that convinces the UEFI/BIOS that the NVMe should be able to boot UEFI.

fortran Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Newbie Joined: 11 Jun 2018 Location: Canada Status: Offline Points: 8	Post Options Post Reply Quote fortran Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 17 Jun 2018 at 8:21am
	I am going to guess that the UEFI/BIOS is just doing something simple. Part of setting up a UEFI bootloader, is telling the system where the EFI System partition is. I think the UEFI/BIOS is looking for the presence of ANY .efi bootloaders in that partition. No loaders, you can't UEFI boot. I have both grub2 and rEFInd installed. Or at least, if I mount partitions manually, mount the 3 magic partitions, and then chroot into the installation, I can run the normal linux tools (for me, debian-like) to see what bootloaders are installed. My system insists that grub (grub-efi) is installed. But I bet you that when grub installed, it didn't write anything to the EFI System partition (which is supposed to be mounted at /boot/efi as a vfat partition). I had subsequently installed rEFInd, and it has written lots of things to /boot/efi. So, in my boot menu, I am starting to see the option of doing a UEFI boot to the NVMe SSD. Nothing is booting (yet), but that is probably another problem.

pcwolf Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Newbie Joined: 06 Jan 2018 Location: Yorktown VA Status: Offline Points: 27	Post Options Post Reply Quote pcwolf Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 17 Jun 2018 at 9:09am
	I am a bit confused, you stated you did get a Legacy boot out of the NVME Is there any reason to insist on UEFI boot?
	pcwolf Man out standing in his field

fortran Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Newbie Joined: 11 Jun 2018 Location: Canada Status: Offline Points: 8	Post Options Post Reply Quote fortran Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 17 Jun 2018 at 11:53am
	Probably not. For quite a while, there were only a few disks that were too big for MBR. Now it is easy to find disks that are too big for MBR. For another long time, we have had UEFI/BIOS on computers. We have the option of turning off legacy (BIOS). At some point in the future, there will be no legacy. This motherboard is supposed to allow for UEFI NVMe booting, but there were problems in getting it there. With Linux, if you boot in Legacy (BIOS) mode, the directory /sys/firmware/ will NOT have a directory with the name 'efi'. If you do not have a /sys/firmware/efi/ directory, there is no way to get grub-efi (or rEFInd) to install, as it needs to update the EFI motherboard information. And that access is (essentially) via /sys/firmware/efi/. There were times at the beginning that I thought /sys/firmware/efi existed, but at the end of the install if I looked in the /boot/efi/ directory I did not see that any files were added. What is especially needed are the '*.efi'" files, which are the bootloaders (in a sense). I am guessing the UEFI/BIOS kept looking at this EFI System partition, and seeing that it contained nothing useful, and hence it would never allow UEFI booting. I had tried to install grub-efi (and dpkg -l \| grep grub shows it is installed) earlier, but it never did install anything into that EFI System partition. I don't know why it didn't give an error, or finish with a return code which indicated that the installation didn't work.

fortran Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Newbie Joined: 11 Jun 2018 Location: Canada Status: Offline Points: 8	Post Options Post Reply Quote fortran Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 19 Jun 2018 at 7:42am
	Grumble. I have grub and rEFInd both installed, which probably isn't a good thing. But, I had the UEFI boot menu entry to boot from the NVMe. When rEFInd writes files, it picks off the linux kernel command line from the current Linux kernel. Which if you have chrooted into a different environment, will not be useful (in general). I am going to guess that somehow I have a combination of parameters from the Devuan-Ascii Live DVD, and what I've set up from a chroot on the NVMe. I suspect part of the problem I am having, is that I actually have 2 completely valid and independent UEFI environments. One is on the SATA3 SSD (and it has a ESP (or /boot/efi)) on it. And now a similar set on the NVMe SSD. And I'm hiding indoors for a while, as I believe we are setting a temperature record outside today, and now is about the hottest time of the day. I think I am beginning to see why the Refracta CD is useful. As I understand things, it boots and then evokes a VM, and so the environment people get to before they might choose to install some almost unknown kind of Linux, ends up with a kernel boot command line that is "rational". So, if a package (like grub or rEFInd) uses the current kernel boot command line as a starting point to install, it doesn't have some of the strange things an environment involving a chroot can involve.