Rocky Linux on VIA Nano CPU?

Rocky Linux Help & Support
1

I happen to have unused embdedded PC that has VIA Nano CPU and specs say:

VIA NanoTM 1.2 GHz processor
• NanoBGA2 package

Wikipedia says that CPU-architechture has “Instruction set IA-32, x86-64”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_Nano

And it sort of boots up when I put it to a USB-stick, but after I choose Install Rocky Linux 10.1 from boot menu, it loads some time and crashes and BIOS-boot cycles.

Apparently it doesn’t work, but is this supposed to work or there is some kind of glitch somewhere? Whole device is quite rare so I would not be surprised that nobody else has tried this.

Tuju

2

Rocky 10 requires a CPU that supports x86_64-v3 and higher so it could well be due to that. Rocky 9 is x86_64-v2 and higher.

Try booting Rocky 9, if it works, then it would suggest your CPU is too old to run Rocky 10. If it does the same with Rocky 9, try Rocky 8.

3

When I was looking around at weekend, I came to conclusion that R8 could work, but I try R9 first. Both have software what I need and some years left.

Thanks,

Tuju

4

R10 and R9 won’t boot with installer, R8 does but this thing has PATA (parallel ATA) disk that has been removed from Enterprise releases.

This thing has an old Fedora, lsmod shows that it had pata_acpi, pata_via modules loaded. Now trying Fedora Server, it failed too to find disk to install.

I think the most likely choice to succeed would be R8 + driverdisk with PATA-drivers. Apparently those are not even on RPM-packages so I’d have to compile those myself, mayble in KVM-instance.

Puuuh, this is getting difficult.

Tuju

5

elrepo does a lot of kmods: packages [ELRepo Wiki]

See this list here: Index of /linux/dud/el8/x86_64 you can see a dd-pata_via. This is a driver update disk iso which you should be able to use to get Rocky installed.

6

Well that was a huge help and it worked. Looks like the “minimal” is not so minimal after all, it needs 20GB which that PATA is not. Only way to try that is kickstart file.

Another thing is an old VT6122 ethernet, velocity driver that is not in the elrepo package names. Need to dig deeper that too.

7

Strange, mine are usually 5GB and I always do a minimal.

8

That PATA is 4GB and yes, me too do a minimal also. Not sure, but it appears that there is also @^minimal-environment dnf group, is that the same as Anaconda selection “Minimal system” whatever, I don’t know.

My first attempt with kickstart failed, will try again later.

9

@tuju I’m one of the ELRepo devs. I’ve created a “kmod-via-velocity” package for EL8. Please let me know if it works for you.

10

Thank you! I’ll try that and let know how it went.

11

Is the padlock driver visible? :slight_smile: (Former Centaurian who helped with the design/support of this CPU)

# dmesg | grep padlock
padlock_aes: Using VIA PadLock ACE for AES algorithm.
padlock_sha: Using VIA PadLock ACE for SHA1/SHA256 algorithms.
# openvpn --show-engines
OpenSSL Crypto Engines

Dynamic engine loading support [dynamic]
VIA PadLock (no-RNG, ACE) [padlock]