"Frankensteined" installation, anyone?

[Steffen Grunewald]

Good morning Thomas,

your suggestions are very appreciated!

(Btw, I found a page in the Debian wiki that warns not to "FrankenDebian"
https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian ...)

On Wed, 2025-09-03 at 21:16:42 +0200, Thomas Lange wrote:
> Hi Steffen,
> 
> if I got it correctly, you want to do a FAI installation on this
> Cavium ThunderX based Gigabyte R120-T35.

In the long run, yes. (It's been a backup machine for another server
for a long time, but it staying behind recent developments puts that
at serious risk.)

Before I can start with that, I need to find a combination of kernels
and kernel command-line parameters that work.
My latest working combo up to now is
- Buster's 4.19.0-xy with a rather boring
   BOOT_IMAGE=/ROOT/debian@/boot/vmlinuz-4.19.0-25-arm64 root=ZFS=rpool/ROOT/debian \
   ro quiet console=tty0 console=ttyS1,115200n8
(yes, there's ZFS involved, but even that behaved nicely until here)

> https://fai-project.org/fai-cd/fai-small_6.2.5-arm64.iso

Fetched it, Balena-etched it onto a USB keydrive.

> It includes a much newer kernel, but hey an easy way to just give it a
> try.

There's always a chance that newer kernels iron out bugs in older ones :)

> Then I can offer an ARM64 nfsroot at
> https://fai-project.org/download/misc/

I also got nfsroot-generic-arm64_6.2.5_6.11.10+bpo-arm64-16k.tar.zst
from that place, I suppose it'd match the iso image next to it, bearing
the same creation date?

> Maybe you can install an old 4.19 kernel into this nfsroot and then
> try to recreate the initrd using dpkg-reconfigure dracut.

I'd always prefer to use PXE (which - with ISC DHCP and TFTPD HPA - works
nicely even on this box) but will give USB a try, just will need to
rearrange things a bit in my office (to host the machine - I refuse to
spend hours and hours in the basement room for testing this one).

I'll let everyone know what I find. In the meantime, I found a number of
boot flags, reasonable-looking ones as well as rather esoteric ones - in
the end the ones which boot the machine are the right ones :)

Thanks so far,
best regards

 Steffen