Introduction

The Cavium Saber board is an arm64 development board based on the ThunderX2 SoC. It has been certified on 16.04.4 and 18.04.

Installation Notes

• Support for the Cavium Saber was added in Ubuntu 17.10 ('ArtfulAardvark'). Installation testing was performed w/ 5.1.1 firmware.

• Cavium Saber support was introduced in 16.04.4 ('XenialXerus') with the Hardware Enablement install option.

A2 Silicon

A2 silicon requires OS workarounds. Ubuntu is carrying those workarounds in the 17.10 and 16.04.4 HWE kernels (4.13-based), but those workarounds will not be carried forward to 16.04.5 or 18.04.

SG_IO: bad/missing sense data

There is a known issue that can cause a boot-time error with 16.04.4 on A2 silicon with certain disks. The symptom is a message like the following on boot:

SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]: 70 00 05 00 00 00 00 0a 04 53 40 fe 21 04
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

If you see an error message on the console like the one above, you may wish to apply the following experimental fix:

$ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:dannf/hdparm-apm -y
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt dist-upgrade -y

MAAS Notes

To configure a system for use in a MAAS cluster:

1. When prompted on boot, enter the BIOS Setup menu.
2. Under "Advanced", enable "Network Stack".
3. If "Network Stack" was not already enabled:
   1. Save changes and exit the BIOS Menu. This will cause the system to reboot.
   2. Once again, when prompted on boot, enter the BIOS Setup menu.
4. Under "Boot", disable any non-network options in the "Boot Option Priorities" list, and enable the NIC option(s) you wish to use to PXE boot from the MAAS server.