Hardware Upgrade

ixuz · n00b Joined: 01 Jun 2009 Posts: 49

Hello all,

I am running my little sweet home server with gentoo since 2010. Since its hardware is a little bit old now, I would swap out the mainboard and ram.

My old one: Intel D510MO mainboard with an Intel Atom D510 CPU (2 core, 1,6 GHz)
New one (planned): ASRock J5040 mainboard with an Intel® Quad-Core Pentium® Silver Processor J5040 (up to 3.2 GHz)

Is this just "plug and play"?

My CFLAG is now and was always without -march/-mtune flag so just generic x86_64 builds. I guess I'm save here.

Is there something in the Kernel I should change? I already know I have to use the external Realtek module for getting ethernet on the new board. Any other Kernel build-in things needed?

My RAID1 with 2 SATA HDDs should normal boot I guess.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Feb 24, 2021 6:20 pm Post subject:

ixuz,

You may need other kernel options.

Make a kernel that hase the modules needed to run on either board.
Boot the new board and leek at its

ixuz · n00b Joined: 01 Jun 2009 Posts: 49

Ok so with lspci I could figure out which PCI IDs I have and the corresponding kernel module.

I found this helpful page: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/ASRock_J5005-ITX

The boards are pretty similar.

Another more problematic thing: I have now a boot partition with ext4. The new board probably need EFI boot, so a vfat partition. Is there a best practice to migrate this?

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Feb 24, 2021 7:14 pm Post subject:

ixuz,

You need an EFI partition to house all your EFI compliant programs. That must use the vfat filesystem.
Your boot loader will be there as it will be loaded by the firmware.
The kernel, initrd and whatever else the boot loader will load need not be on the EFI partition. It only needs to be somewhere that the boot loader can read.

grub needs to be built to be EFI compliant, so I suspect that you will need to do the first boot with EFI live media, since you need to be in EFI mode to update the firmware EFI variables.
Eventually, you will need that support in your kernel too.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

ixuz · n00b Joined: 01 Jun 2009 Posts: 49

Meanwhile I switched successfully from a "gentoo-sources" to a "gentoo-kernel-bin" Kernel.

If I now grab a new motherboard which supports CSM (legacy BIOS compatibility) it should be just plug and play. My old system is now up to date regards the gentoo system.

Did I miss something? (Btw. my system has only two HDDs via bootable MDRAID raid1, this should work in the new system too.)

figueroa · Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2021 4:01 am Post subject:

I would definitely be looking a board that supported legacy booting.
_________________
Andy Figueroa
hp pavilion hpe h8-1260t/2AB5; spinning rust x3
i7-2600 @ 3.40GHz; 16 gb; Radeon HD 7570
amd64/23.0/split-usr/desktop (stable), OpenRC, -systemd -pulseaudio -uefi

ixuz · n00b Joined: 01 Jun 2009 Posts: 49

Just wanted to let you know that the hardware upgrade went well.

Only bad thing was, that my RAID got rebuild while booting for the first time. Man I couldn't remember how hard the impact on the whole system performance is. I could swear, that the rebuild 10 years ago was not that impacting. I mean even the system boot took 10 minutes compared too a couple of seconds. But I can see nowhere any errors and HDD SMART parameters looks good.

However System now works great and man is it blazing fast: