Booting from eMMC - EFI and GRUB weirdness (x86, SAXA SS5000 Pro)

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

I'm currently trying to bring up OpenWrt on a SAXA SS5000 Pro, an interesting Japanese X86-based UTM firewall thingy (pdf). As can be expected from a device for the Japanese market, it is slightly weird, with failover ethernet ports, an AX88772B-based 100 mbit management port, and a switch I couldn't get to work yet. But that's actually not the issue I'm having.

The device happily boots off an USB stick containing OpenWrt. I then dd'd an combined-efi 23.05.2 OpenWrt image to /dev/mmcblk0. Secure Boot is disabled, as is the watchdog that reboots the device after a minute or so.

But the device fails to consistently boot OpenWrt off the eMMC.

In EFI boot mode, the device fails to even start GRUB, it only says "no boot device found". No matter what I do, I can't make the BIOS see the OpenWrt installation.

When I put it into legacy boot mode, it boots OpenWrt (yes, the -efi version!) off the eMMC, but not automatically. If I let GRUB time out to start the default option, it only boots into the GRUB shell and stays there. Only if, on the GRUB selection screen, I manually press enter to confirm booting of OpenWrt, it will successfully boot.

This puzzles me, and I'm honestly a bit stumped about what I could try to get this thing to consistently boot up on its own. Does any of this sound familar to anyone, is there a best practice I missed?

TIA for any help!

2

Probably too late now, but what's the default boot loader ?

EDIT: What would happen if you booted grub from the flash drive, but told it to boot Openwrt off the eMMC ?

3

Any other BIOS settings that might protect EFI variables, may have disabled the removable media path or otherwise lock down the boot process?

If you can (some kind of usable console access), testing a general purpose distribution (e.g. Debian) might be interesting, as those are more flexible in quite some ways.

There may be some BIOSes that insist on >500 MB EFI system partition (and OpenWrt's UEFI partitioning is a bit special (no efibootmgr, etc.), which might cause its own issues), this is something where using d-i (Debian's installer) might provide interesting test results.

4

Thank you for both of your input.

Too late, yes, but I believe I remember it was some version of GRUB it booted right into the manufacturer's firmware. I really should have taken logfiles at least. The first time I tried booting OpenWrt was already last November, though, so it has been a bit.

I do have console access, and I can acccess the BIOS via console redirect.

Honestly, I could even do without EFI, if it booted in Legacy Mode, it consistently starts up OpenWrt's GRUB. But what irritates me is that it would then not boot automatically, but require me to confirm the first boot option. What could that be about? Logic would suggest that confirming the first boot option would be the same as running out the timeout, no?

Anyway, I will try the things you two suggested and report back. I don't have a permanent Healing Bench™ at the moment, so it requires me to set up and tear down in order not to risk my WAF score, so it could be a day or two. Please be patient with me.

5

Well great. In an attempt to stop OpenWrt's GRUB from constantly resetting, preventing me from actually entering anything on its command line, I disabled "console redirect output after POST" thinking it may be the interfering option ... and promptly shut myself out of all console output, including getting back into BIOS, even after clearing the CMOS.

Sigh.

I have half a mind stopping to throw good time after bad, salvaging the (quite good) Wifi card and the RAM and then chucking the thing. It's probably not worth the time, there's other great devices here that are more cooperative.

6

Pulled the battery too ?

7

It's soldered to the board. The CMOS reset jumper is a microswitch, I'm leaving it off for a few hours. But I don't have high hopes.

8

Wow, never seen that before.

You don't have a VGA port connector anywhere on the PCB ?
Like the black one next to the fan in Trustwave TS-25 wired router HW discovery - #3 by frollic

9

The board has an unpopulated footprint for a female HDMI connector. I have no idea if it is electrically connected, though.

10

post a photo or two, of the internals, will you ?

:slight_smile:

11

@frollic In good time, maybe for wikidevi or something along those lines. I appreciate you trying to help, I really do, but the device's hardware -- or at least where and how to tap into its console output -- is not really a mystery to me. The problem is the boot process, and for today's screwup with the console redirect I have noone to blame but myself. Worst case, If I feel like it I can get another one of those devices for a song and a dance plus shipping, but that one would still be as uncooperative as this one. At the moment I'm thinking I should invest my time with something different (Trend Micro Cloud Edge 70s/100s G2 are getting really cheap second-hand right now).