Minis Forum HM90 & Linux

[edwaleni]

I picked up a Minis Forum HM90 EliteMini with the idea of creating a low power, small footprint Proxmox VE host.

Since it has the mobile Ryzen 9 4900H (8C/16T) and supports replaceable DDR4 SO-DIMM and NVMe slot (and 2 SATA drives) this appeared on paper to be a reasonable candidate.

However, I found its behavior under Linux to be different.

Issue Home

The first issue I ran into is a USB boot issue depending on the distro.

Using a traditional ISO to USB install method....

Any SUSE or RedHat distro can get past what appears to be a bug in the UEFI or the USB chipset.

Any Debian based distribution (including Ubuntu and all their derivatives) cannot deal with this bug and dumps me into that "unable to locate a medium with a live file system" error after I get a few entries in dmesg about /init: Line 49 "Can't open /dev/sdd: No medium found"

If I didn't know better its as if Debian and their ilk are resetting the USB bus and the USB boot device is lost to the OS.

I followed various changes recommended online to the grub.cfg all to no avail. Putting in debug breaks, and then removing and reinserting the USB sticks and telling BusyBox to continue. None of them worked.

Next I tried to PXE boot the device and avoid the USB boot process altogether, but once again Debian and their clones would bring up the install and when I used the keyboard or mouse (both USB) they would freeze and I would be forced to hard reset. If I PXE boot OS'es like Alma Linux or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, no issues at all.

I have the latest UEFI from Minis Forum and have reviewed several options available (it is very customizable), and tested from various power management schemes, IOMMU settings and other various options. No joy.

I used various brands and iterations of USB sticks to make sure I didn't have a bad stick or bad image. PXE was pulling the latest and greatest stable builds.

I did locate some bugs in Debian posted some 10 years ago about various USB booting issues, but Debian fixed them ages ago.

Issue Forum

Seems none of the OS's can deal with a somewhat new and unique wireless/BT card in the second M.2 slot.

It's a AMD RZ608, which is a rebranded Mediatek MT7921 which has the 2x2 radio and bluetooth module. All the OS'es see the BT module but cannot start up the WiFi radio.

Seems there is a kernel patch that came out and it was supposed to be mainlined here in the near future (5.16?) But you still need to make sure you have the firmware or the card won't start.

Since I don't really need WiFi for a Proxmox node, I might just remove it or put something else there in its place.

Of course none of these issues occur in Windows. W10/W11 have all the needed drivers/firmware and the downloadable ones are Windows only.

Worse case I will image the NVMe drive with Proxmox/Debian on another machine and see if it will stay stable.

[edwaleni]

After reviewing & some research it appears that some (but not all) Linux builds have problems with the AMD IOMMU in some of these Minis Forum Mobile Ryzen models.

The last time I ran into a weird IOMMU issue was on the Lenovo Mobile Ryzen 3400, which was eventually resolved.

Well, here we are again with a Mobile Ryzen 9 and here we are with odd IOMMU issues.

The working instructions so far are as such:

- in UEFI, turn off IOMMU and SVM
- Install the offending version of Linux
- Edit grub.cfg to add a AMD_IOMMU=force_enable & iommu=pt
- Recompile grub
- Reboot
- go back into UEFI and turn on the IOMMU and SVM
- Reboot
- OS boots, go check AMD-Vi & KVM status

I did this with Proxmox/Debian and while it appears to work, it falls down a lot, mostly in the networking and is awfully slow in booting.

So I simply installed Alma Linux as a virtualization host, and it worked fine. No grub changes, no work arounds.

Recognized everything, storage, NIC's, and was very fast.

I did swap out that AMD RZ608 radio for an Intel AX210, but at the moment it only picks up the 2.4Ghz band.

And from what I have read, there are some hoops to go through on that too.

I find it kind of odd that after all these years of Ryzen's, there are still versions of Linux struggling with that AMD IOMMU.

Especially those mobile ones.

[edwaleni]

Solved. Proxmox installed

Set UEFI to SVM = Enabled and IOMMU = Disabled
Install OS
Reboot
Edit grub.cfg
add "amd_iommu=force_enable iommu=pt" to the DEFAULT LINUX line.
Save and recompile grub.
Reboot
Enter UEFI and changed "IOMMU=Auto" ('Enabled' seems to cause some problems)
Save and reboot
OS should run fine, virtualization works as expected.

If you run ESXi on this you need the Fling Pack and the USBNIC pack added to the build ISO or the NIC's won't work (or a USB NIC of your choosing)

Citrix Hypervisor Express causes constant NVME timeouts. While the daemon restarts most of the time, it stops once it switches over to the install status bar. Install stops with an unrecoverable file system error and hangs.

Thanks to several posters publicly and on the Minis Forum discussion boards for helping me root out the install problems.

[pfg-josecastillo]

GREAT INFO. I have 2 of these, max'd memory, 1TB NVME and 2x2TB SSD. The only OS I have successfully installed is Windows 11. Tried Server 2022 but several drivers are included in the AMD display driver (using latest adrenaline) and it throws an unrecoverable errors and then only give choice to exit. All linux has hung immediately after painting install screen or when you move mouse or touch keyboard.

edwaleni, you mention that Alma Linux installs fine, no work-around or grub edits, but I find it locks up immedately after painting install screen. Did I miss something?

[pfg-josecastillo]

Got Windows Server 2022 Server installed with all devices recognized. When the AMD installer fails, it drops all drivers into C:\AMD...all you need to do is go through all devices and run update against that dir for any remaining drivers. The 2.5 GB NIC needed to be "hand added" as a Inter(R) Ehternet Network Adaptor I225-T1...