Monitor not working?

[KurtStam]

Hi Uli,

The latest centos (7.4) seems to work ok but I have no signal going to my HDMI display. Is it just me or is this just the way it is. Any ideas how to go about fixing it?

Cheers,

--Kurt

[umiddelb]

Hi Kurt,

honestly, I don't pay much attention to things like HDMI output or even accelerated graphics (e.g. ARM Mali).

Which device do you have in mind? If it is supported by Armbian you may learn some tricks there. I suppose that the graphics driver needs to be equipped with some kernel command line parameter specifying screen resolution, color depth or refresh rate. These things can be adopted easily to CentOS.

Cheers

Uli

[KurtStam]

@umiddelb well I'd like to add least have a text base display in case ssh is not working so I can debug things. It's currently hooked up to a AOS monitor with 1920x1080 @ 60Hz resolution. I've been looking at armbian, very nice.. Can I set params in /boot/conf.d/uEnv.txt, or do you think I need to play with recompiling the kernel?

BTW I tried https://dl.armbian.com/pine64/nightly/Armbian_5.45.180515_Pine64_Debian_stretch_next_4.14.40.7z

and that works for me. How did you create the Armbian_5.35_Pine64_U-Boot.bin image? I'd like to see if I can make one using Armbian_5.45 to see if that solves the issue.

[umiddelb]

Hm,

do you have a working eth0 interface with 4.14.40?

If you are happy with that configuration you may consider to replace the Debian userland by the CentOS one. This should leave the firmware and the kernel image untouched, so I would expect that the HDMI console will work there as well. Then I can start to merge the settings into my own uEnv.txt and see if there is a relevant patch missing in my kernel.

[KurtStam]

@umiddelb - Yes it works ok:

ssh 192.168.2.5
... snip...

---

| _ () __ ___ / /_ | || |
| |) | | ' \ / _ \ '_ | || |_
| /| | | | | / (_) | |
|| ||| |_|_|___/ |_|

Welcome to ARMBIAN 5.45.180515 nightly Debian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch) 4.14.40-sunxi64
System load: 1.89 0.81 0.31 Up time: 2 min
Memory usage: 5 % of 1970MB IP: 192.168.2.5
Usage of /: 9% of 15G

What's the easiest procedure to do the Debian -> centos replacement?

[KurtStam]

@umiddelb Well I simply tried deleting everything from the SD card except for /boot and then I extracted the userland Centos 7.4 rootfs using the exact tar cmd from the centos64-01.sh (not taking /boot from it). I added a /etc/fstab, and it seems to all work ok :). I have a console that I can login at, and I can also login over ssh. The console works on my big 1080x1920 screen as well as my little monitor. This is a huge step forwards.

[umiddelb]

As mentioned here, you should keep /lib/modules, as the kernel modules reside there.

[KurtStam]

Thanks @umiddelb, that makes a lot of sense.

BTW Centos 7 just went to vault.mirror.org to get ready for 8. The new iso's are all installer iso's. I wonder what approach we'd need to take to support consuming those. Any ideas on that yet?