Name: Lukasz Dec
Title/Job Description: Developer / Business & Innovation Development
Company: AlmostCyb.org
Location/Country: EU, now in Greece
First AArch64 device: Raspberry Pi model B
LinkedIn: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukaszdec]
Other Social Media:Staying away from social media 
Favorite Book/Movie/Song/TV Show: Book - A Million Little Pieces, Music - Pat Metheny older albums, TV Show - Flashforward, and many more.
I love technology being applied to anything.
Running (chronological order ) - DOS, MacOS, IRIX, Solaris, WIndows, Ubuntu.
With Ampere, for the moment testing project with TTS without GPU, later will try with NVidia GPU. So far it is amazing.
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Welcome! I’d be interested to get more information about who you talked to and what response you got when you asked about the Workstation BIOS for the ALTRAD8UD-1L2T.
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Hi, I have sent an email to Justin that was on today’s presentation.
That would be great to have it as booting time with all server extras it is pretty annoying between 90-600 seconds with all options opt out.
Changing kernel to 64k helped a bit with the speed on 24.04.
Switching to 64k on 22.04 was a disaster as it switched back to kernel 5 and stopped working.
Easier was to reinstall than playing with GRUB, didn’t have anything yet on that drive.
Now testing Quatro if there is any improvement cores / memory.
Great machine, but with current BIOS 2.x not an easy to play with different settings as it takes a long time. Anyway it is better than it was with 1.x.
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The boot might be getting slowed down by Ubuntu trying to get DHCP addresses on unconnected network interfaces. I wrote about fixing that and other ideas to try at Speeding up Ubuntu boot on Ampere-based Systems | Wiki.js.
Also make sure you’ve disabled the Network Stack in the BIOS if you haven’t done so already and you don’t need network booting. That saves a bit of time since it won’t try and push the inventory information to the BMC.
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Hi Rebecca,
Thank You for guidance.
Network stack is disabled.
I will disable DHCP as per your link.
As I’m still discovering fine tuning options I have some questions
- Did you try to use built-in UEFI to switch between disks or flavors of Ubuntu? As machine came with installed Ubuntu 24.04 and grub I didn’t try that. I have inserted second NVMe and installed Ubuntu 22.04, not server but desktop version as I’m using it as workstation and added it to grub.
- Switching kernel to 64k on 24.04 with 256GB RAM worked like a charm. Increase of memory usage on idle went from 0.3% to 1.3%, but same task with bazel took ~20% less time.
Trying to switch 22.04 to 64k forces you to switch kernel to 5.x. That’s ok as NVidia Cuda requires 5.15.0-102, but this version is not available :)).
- Did you try to connect SSDs to Oculink or Slimline? I’m exploring the idea, but couldn’t find much about it.
- I’m trying to read fans info with psensor or other tools, but not getting any info. Even in BIOS they are either N/A or have 0 as reading. Any ideas? Not that’s important just curious.
I think that’s it for the moment.
Thank You again for guidance with booting time.
I really hope that they would come up with BIOS for workstation, like others did.
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Welcome to this community, @Wookie69 . 
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I have SSDs connected to the SlimSAS ports. I ended up realizing they’re just a different packaging of PCIe lanes so I got a x8 SlimSAS to 2x x4 U.2 adapter and plugged in a couple of SSDs.
I’m using UEFI to switch between FreeBSD and openSUSE. BIOS upgrades wipe out the boot menu, but it’s easy enough to drop into the UEFI Shell, boot an OS then run efibootmgr to restore them.
I’m not seeing any fan readings now either, though they were showing up in OpenBMC previously.
From the host, you should be able to see them by running sudo ipmitool sensor.
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I did follow your Speeding up guide.
After changing to false in .yaml they were not visible anymore … so I have found another way that works.
I have created 3 files in /etc/netplan/
01-network-manager-all.yaml
50-cloud-init.yaml
99-disable-network-config.cfg
content of 01-…
network:
version: 2
renderer: NetworkManager
content of 50-… (I have removed real interfaces as they were showing my MACs)
(You can find them with ip a)
network:
ethernets:
enP3xxxx0:
dhcp4: true
enP3xxxx1:
dhcp4: false
enP3xxxx2:
dhcp4: false
enx9xxxx3:
dhcp4: false
version: 2
content of 99-…(this one disables cloud init in my case it was not installed but was still looking for it)
network: {config: disabled}
I hope this helps others in speeding up :).
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Hi Rebecca,
So Justin responded saying that he will talk to his team to discuss making simplified BIOS for MB
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In my setup doesn’t show anything … will dig deeper to find out why I cannot see RPM of fans.