Gentoo On X-Gene 1 Mudan

Overview
The Mudan is an AARCH64 (arm64) server board based on the APM X-Gene 1 CPU. It has an a Board Management Controller (BMC) based on the ASPEED-2400 chipset.

The BMC provides remote power on/off, JavaSOL for a remote serial link and for a remote (graphical?) console viewer jviewer. These are both Java Webstart applications and offer low or zero functionality with current javaws.

Plan to do the install without a console. Mine doesn't work yet.

The idea is to prepare the boot disk, install it in the Mudan, boot, then ssh in from a safe distance.

Preparation
Its an EFI based system. Follow the amd64 handbook for partitioning and so on. Do remember to use the arm64 stage3.

Use grub as your boot leader.

A bootable arm64 Linux is required. There are a few steps that must be carried out on the Mudan itself. The Debian one was used after discovering that the Fedora offering would not drive the console.

Gotchas
The Mudan has two 1GBit Ethernet ports. The one on top of the two USB ports is for the BMC. The one on its own, or by the two 10Gbit ports is for the server itself. Connect both of them.

The Install - Off the Mudan
Do as much as possible away from the Mudan. This author chrooted in to the Mudan install on a Raspberry Pi4 to do the rc-config setup and build grub then cross compiled the kernel.

Partition The Drive Untar the Stage3 Untar the portage snapshot

The Kernel
Installing crossdev and the kernel build process is covered by Raspberry_Pi_3_64_bit_Install.

The key differences are: The kernel options required As the Mudan is an EFI system, the EFI firmware provides the Device Tree Binary (*.dtb)

/etc/default/grub
/etc/default/grub requires the following addition LANG=C
 * 1) fix boot error    error: file /boot/grub/locale/C.gmo not found