Can not boot ISO live disk

[linuxgnuru]

When attempting to boot an arm ISO live disk with pftf I get:

EFI stub: Booting Linux Kernel...
EFI stub: Generating empty DTB
EFI stub: Loaded initrd from command line option
EFI stub: Exiting boot services...

then it just hangs with no other messages. If, however, I use tow-boot the same USB flash live disk boots without any problems

[jlinton]

Can you put earlycon on the boot command line and attach the output. Which ISO is this?

[linuxgnuru]

It is an ISO of Pop 22.04. Using tow-boot it was able to boot. I'll add the earlycon and post the output in a bit.

[thefossguy]

It is an ISO of Pop 22.04.

@linuxgnuru how do you have an ISO of Pop!_OS arm64 w/ EFI?

There is a UEFI ARM64 build in progress, but they haven't released it publicly yet. And that isn't even an ISO, only a raw image is generated from the build script found here.

I can confirm this is a problem with Ubuntu 22.04 arm64 ISO.

RHEL 9 works... Partially. I can install it on my Pi and boot the installation. It fails when I reboot it for the 2nd/3rd/4th time. That is, without upgrading any package. Not tinkering with installation. Booting it up, letting it idle for ~10 minutes and reboot.

The only Linux distribution that has worked without any jarring issues (at least so far) is Debian 11.3.0; Not considering GPU and Wi-Fi drivers since I don't use either.

Do note that I have quite unique installation, eliminating the need for a secondary storage drive :)

Below is my layout of my 32 GB memory card

partition	size	format	mount point
1	512 MB	fat32	none (storing EFI firmware here)
2	512 MB	fat32	/boot/efi
2	28 GB	ext4	/

[ofthesun9]

When upgrading to ubuntu 22.04 (vmlinuz-5.15.0-37-generic), I noticed that I lost the video output (booting with ACPI only).
I still can login, but this is an headless set-up right now :-)
I guess there is an issue with the framebuffer initialization ?

[linuxgnuru]

Sorry it's taken me awhile to get back, I work at system76 which is how I got the ISO. We're still working on things to and once they are ironed out I'll be able to supply more info.

[thefossguy]

@linuxgnuru noted.

I did request Jeremy to support this use case. Nice to know it is being considered! :D

I don't exactly remember what happened, but I installed Ubuntu 20.04.3 and either enabled HWE kernel to 5.15 or upgraded to 22.04. That caused the installation to no longer boot. It has also been a problem installing Ubuntu 22.04 (in a VM) on M1 machines. So, from what I can deduce, it looks like Ubuntu's 5.15.yy kernel is causing issues.

Can you try using a newer kernel?

Also, this is not just Ubuntu. RHEL 9.0 has similar issues too. With FreeBSD, it straight up does not boot, complaining something about EFI, which I don't remember off the top of my head.

So the core issue of this problem seems to be broken/incomplete UEFI firmware for the Raspberry Pi 4 (don't have a Raspberry Pi 3 to test it on).