Ref: Recent commit upgrading to Buildroot 23.05 (kernel 6.3.6)

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During testing of the 23.05 version of buildroot, I found that the kernel included in buildroot 23.05, i.e kernel version 6.3.6 won't boot on one of my Intel GPU based test systems, a system which works fine using the current 21.08.2 versions of ShredOS. Googling this issue it looks like there is some issues with the 6.3 kernels, possibly from kernel versions 6.3.2 to 6.3.8. The symptoms are "failing to boot, i.e. black screen after grub". It's unclear whether it's just an Intel GPU based issue or whether a bug has been introduced into the ACPI code which effects other GPUs or whether there is some other cause.

Due to this I won't be releasing ShredOS based on this Kernel and instead will wait for the 23.08 buildroot stable release and if that kernel passes on my test systems then I will release a new version of ShredOS based on buildroot 23.08.

If you are thinking of building ShredOS from source I would avoid using the master code and instead use code from any of the 21.08.2 releases or pre-releases of ShredOS.

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Regarding 23.05 (kernel 6.3.6). The workaround for me on a Intel GPU based system 0:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-P Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c) is to append nomodeset on the kernel command line in /EFI/BOOT/grub.cfg & /boot/grub.cfg.

This allows ShredOS to boot as normal but interestingly still using the native resolution of the display. So I can't be absolutely sure but it looks like a possible bug in the i915.ko driver.

Certainly looking at the commit history of the kernel, unless I'm mistaken there has been over 380 commits to the /drm/i915 source since Apr 2023 !. So they have certainly been busy on that code.

On the plus side, the 6.3.6 kernel seems to initialise the USB devices faster in that any USB drives appear in nwipe the first time nwipe is displayed rather than you having to Cntrl C to restart nwipe to show USB devices. So not all bad.

I also added USB serial interface support so by hooking up the appropriate USB serial (RS232) adapter to your system and connecting it to another computer running ShredOS you can you can bring up the console output on another computer. You would need to add console=ttyUSB0,115200N8 and change the log level from loglevel=3 to loglevel=7. So the kernel command line looks like this linux /boot/shredos console=ttyUSB0,115200N8 console=tty3 loglevel=7 splash nomodeset. The program minicom is now included in ShredOS. Typically on the 2nd computer that will display the log, assuming it's running ShredOS you would ALT F2 to switch to the 2nd virtual terminal and then type minicom -D /dev/ttyUSB0.

Not many people would have a use for this but might be useful for some when troubleshooting a headless system.