Installing on ARM

[djohnson]

I am having trouble booting the Rocky 9.6 or 10.0 installation on an ARM-based laptop and could use pointers on how to troubleshoot this. The laptop is a Dell XPS 13 9345 with a Qualcomm Snapdragon “X Elite” / X1E-80-100 CPU. Secure Boot is disabled.

In all cases a few lines of text are shown, the screen goes black, and 5-12 seconds later the system reboots. The text varies slightly depending on which thing I try to boot.

Rocky-10-latest-aarch64-minimal.iso (2025-06-11)

EFI stub: Decompressing Linux Kernel…
EFI stub: Loaded initrd from LINUX_EFI_INITRD_MEDIA_GUID device path
EFI stub: Measured initrd data into PCR 9
EFI stub: Generating empty DTB
EFI stub: Exiting boot services…

Rocky-aarch64-minimal.iso (v9.6, 2025-05-30)

EFI stub: Decompressing Linux Kernel…
EFI stub: Using DTB from configuration table
EFI stub: Exiting boot services…

iPXE download via HTTP of files taken from Rocky-9.6-aarch64-dvd.iso (2025-05-30), plus a DTB taken from an Ubuntu v24.10 (Oracular Oriole) live-image which boots.

EFI stub: Decompressing Linux Kernel…
EFI stub: Loaded initrd from LINUX_EFI_INITRD_MEDIA_GUID device path
EFI stub: Measured initrd data into PCR 9
EFI stub: Using DTB from configuration table
EFI stub: Exiting boot services…

For reference the iPXE stanza being used is
=-=-=-
set base-url http://server/path/rocky96/
set nfs server/path/r96/
kernel ${base-url}vmlinuz initrd=one root=nfs:${nfs} rw ip=dhcp selinux=0
initrd --name one ${base-url}initrd.img
fdt ${base-url}x1e80100-dell-xps13-9345.dtb
boot || goto failed
=-=-=-

[djohnson]

I did some more poking at this yesterday and wanted to update this thread for the next person who feels like trying this.

There is a project trying to document the pitfalls of various models here: https://aarch64-laptops.github.io/ . The current listing for this laptop references kernel 6.13 and specifies two kernel parameters (“clk_ignore_unused pd_ignore_unused”). Adding those did not help my setup.

The Ubuntu ISO which does boot is using kernel “6.14.0-32-qcom-x1e”. If anyone wants to examine it directly it is still available at https://people.canonical.com/~platform/images/ubuntu-concept/oracular-desktop-arm64+x1e-20250402.iso .

I realize that I should have begun with a test of stock RHEL 9 (maybe 10) because if that fails then of course Rocky won’t work either. I intend to do that test tomorrow but I’m not holding much hope right now. Assuming RHEL fails I may open a Bugzilla ticket.