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Dortania Bugtracker
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Suggest using "cpus=1" for initial NVRAM boot-args to give coherent and complete logging output. #249

Open jjzanin opened 2 years ago

jjzanin commented 2 years ago

Hello, thank you so much for the "Installation Guide", it is amazing!

I have a suggestion for the guide that I think would help people. I went through the guide for Coffee Lake and ran into a kernel panic that was difficult to diagnose because the logging output was incomplete. The boot process stopped at "pci (build ..." and didn't finish the line. This led me to believe that I was "Stuck on RTC..., PCI Configuration Begins, Previous Shutdown..., HPET, HID: Legacy..." After many days of trying to figure out what was wrong I eventually set "cpus=1" as a boot arg, because in my experience, multiple threads cause problems with output. Once I did that, I got the full output with the callstack and kernel panic. It was actually "Invalid frame pointer" that was the problem and I was able to finally resolve my booting issue because my motherboard (Gigabyte Z370 AORUS Gaming 7 with the latest firmware) doesn't have MATs.

panic

dreamwhite commented 2 years ago

I admit that I don't see any reason of suggesting such things... I don't wanna be rude but it's rather a matter of your configuration rather than using that boot-arg. I'd highly suggest closing this issue as it may lead to misinformation

jjzanin commented 2 years ago

It was absolutely a configuration problem and I'm not suggesting that was the fix to my problem, I listed out the reason: Having multiple cores active resulted in output that was incomplete, leading to a red herring. The only practical way to debug a boot crash for most people is with logging and if you can't get information from the logging, you can't debug it. I'm not suggesting leaving this boot argument, it should be removed in the post-install. I think it should at least be mentioned that this helps with the logs.

chriswayg commented 2 years ago

I would expect to find a recommendation for unusual things like "cpus=1" as boot-args in the Debugging section, but not in the main guide as a default.

https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Install-Guide/troubleshooting/debug.html#opencore-debugging

jjzanin commented 2 years ago

Yep, that would be fine.