Bios V3.3 - Cant`t boot with Legacy Mode

electrolyt

Hi all,

for me is it necessary to boot the board in legacy mode. I have the BIOS V3.3 installed.
I logged into the bios as administrator and change the boot setting to Only legacy mode.
I put on a sata drive that has already Win 10 with mbr for legacymode installed.
The bios detected the drive, the boot priority was changed.
But at each boot the bios-system apperas with the login request.

Is the efi / legacy mode in V3.3 still not working ?
Has someone the older BIOS V1.3 for a download where efi / legacy mode is running ?

eduncan911

@electrolyt said:
Hi all,

for me is it necessary to boot the board in legacy mode. I have the BIOS V3.3 installed.
I logged into the bios as administrator and change the boot setting to Only legacy mode.
I put on a sata drive that has already Win 10 with mbr for legacymode installed.
The bios detected the drive, the boot priority was changed.
But at each boot the bios-system apperas with the login request.

Is the efi / legacy mode in V3.3 still not working ?
Has someone the older BIOS V1.3 for a download where efi / legacy mode is running ?

Hello and welcome to the forums.

My UP Squared w/3.3 does not have an option for legacy modes - and UP has always said these devices are UEFI only. I've been tinkering with UP products for over a year now and they have never supported Legacy bios modes.

If you are logging into the bios with an administrator password (and not pressing enter for normal bios), then you are entering into the sections that provide no warranty nor support.

What is the reason that you need Legacy? Perhaps I can help as I've converted several systems from legacy to EFI.

electrolyt

Hi eduncan911,

Thank you for your answer. I need the legacy mode to format the drive with mbr and different patitions.
I want to install a software plc from siemens cpu 1507s.
This programm need a mbr file system and creates a seperate partition as own storage for remanent datas.
Also the software starts during the boot process the win 10 operation system as virtual system with the use of a Bare Metal Hypervisor. By the installation of the plc will be a exclusive boot loader installed.

So the installation of the plc change partitions, create a bootloader, handel the resources for the virtualization.

Is there a other way to boot with a drive in mbr format ?

eduncan911

I do not know of a way to boot UP boards with legacy, only UEFI.

It's funny you mention the hypervisor to boot Windows 10 as a VM - as that is exactly what I've done to get around MBR requirements by other OSes: I install Xen EFI (a well known but hardcore bare metal hypervisor), and setup a HVM (or PV if drivers are available) that boots the OS of choice as MBR as a VM.

Xen does support running hypervisors within hypervisors (by passing the instruction set through). I've actually configured one system with Xen as base and started Windows where I installed VMware Workstation within for testing.

If you want to try Xen, which has a steep learning curve but affords a great amount of flexibility like this, I highly recommend installing Arch Linux first (which in and of itself has another steep learning curve). The reason why is I've tried the default Xen versions in several Linux distros on UP Squared boards and none of them function with EFI properly (it's a common problem with Xen on any EFI machine). FYI: Xen requires you to install a normal OS first (using EFI) and then you install Xen, which in turn boots a thin layer for virtualization and then boots the original OS as the "domain 0" root VM, or dom0 for short.

I have had to install ArchLinux on most machines to get Xen EFI installed and working properly (which I highly prefer Arch after using it for years). And the UP Squared was no different. I had zero issues with a proper Xen EFI setup on /boot (not /boot/efi). The reason why Arch is that you install the latest version of the kernel and driver's, as well as the latest version of Xen (4.11 as of the time of this writing). Most distros, like Ubuntu, use too old versions of Xen and their EFI setups are usually broken IMO. Arch just works out of the box - but again, Arch has a big learning curve for beginners.

I have not installed Xen EFI on the UP Board or Core though, only the UP Squared. However, I don't see any difference. It uses the same Intel eMMC 5.0 storage and network.

If you decide to go this route, keep your base Arch install as light as possible. Only install the bare packages you need, and keep track of the dev packages to remove after u build Xen. I have a bare Arch dom0 running at 120 MB on my UP^2, which does keep most of the ram free for other VMs. So on the UP Board, you can still use most of the 4 GB for this setup.

nukular

FYI, Xen also works just fine with Ubuntu 16.04 and the upboard kernel. I've compiled it from source, though and then installed it manually with the instructions below. Not sure how that compares to using ArchLinux, maybe that's easier, just thought I'd post it here if anyone wants to use Xen with Ubuntu as dom0.

Instructions:
Compile and make install Xen first.

EFI firmware => Xen.efi [loads vmlinuz and ramdisk and executes vmlinuz]
To install it please follow these directions:
sudo mkdir /boot/efi/EFI/xen
sudo cp /boot/vmlinuz* /boot/efi/EFI/xen
sudo cp /boot/initr* /boot/efi/EFI/xen/
[Both the Linux kernel and initramdisk MUST reside in the same directory as xen.efi]
sudo cp xen/xen/xen.efi /boot/efi/EFI/xen
Create the xen.cfg file:

[global]
default=ubuntu
[ubuntu]
options=console=vga,com1 com1=115200,8n1 iommu=verbose ucode=scan flask=disabled conring_size=209715$
kernel=vmlinuz-4.9.45-upboard root=/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root ro splash vt.handoff=7
ramdisk=initrd.img-4.9.45-upboard

Change root=/… to what cat /proc/cmdline says
Change kernel and ramdisk to whatever yours are named

Add the xen.efi to the EFI boot manager:
efibootmgr -c -d /dev/mmcblk0 -p 1 -w -L "Xen" -l "\EFI\xen\xen.efi"

eduncan911

@nukular said:
FYI, Xen also works just fine with Ubuntu 16.04 and the upboard kernel. I've compiled it from source, though and then installed it manually with the instructions below. Not sure how that compares to using ArchLinux, maybe that's easier, just thought I'd post it here if anyone wants to use Xen with Ubuntu as dom0.

Nice! Yeah, compiling from source should work. Anything Xen 4.9+ is recommended because of the EFI and IOMMU fixes/tweaks. I tried the older Xen packages that are part of aptitude within Ubilinux, Ubuntu 16.04 and 17.10 - which all failed.

With Arch, you are forced to install the community package that maintains the latest upstream version available for download (4.11 as of this writing). You also get the latest Linux kernel with Arch, 4.18 as of this writing, and continues to update as you update the system. Hence, "rolling releases."