I’ve spent hours trying to get QNX running on my new Liger board. So far, there has been no combination of BIOS settings which will do either of the following:
Allow the USB keyboard to operate after the BIOS startup (There is no PS2 option and no USB emulation in this BIOS)
Allow the QNX SATA AHCI “Scanning for devices” step to not lock up the DVD installation boot process
Let alone get both working at the same time! I can disable SATA to get the install DVD booted past the SATA ahci scanning for devices stage, only to be locked out of the process at the first keyboard input prompt (Since the USB keyboard wont activate on any USB port).
Is it even possible to get QNX installed and running on this board? It has a newer Phoenix SecureCore BIOS which is considerably different than my other Versalogic boards (Komodo and Leopard) which have been working fine with 6.5.0 for years now.
You might have to create your own QNX boot image on a USB thumb drive. That image can contain the USB drivers to enable USB keyboard and mouse support (this is essentially how QNX 7.0 works) and the EIDE driver for the DVD (presumably you got the DVD to boot by running the SATA in legacy mode in the BIOS) .
At that point you can mount the DVD and do the install process by hand (QNX terminal). Been a while since I looked at the QNX install DVD but I think it’s just scripts you can execute from a terminal.
You can ghost an existing 6.5 install from a working QNX 6.5 machine into the harddrive of the Liger board. Depending on how you have your boot process set up (all in the .boot image or just enough to start the hard disk driver and everything else from scripts on the hard drive) that might be all you need to do. If everything is in your .boot image (I hope not) then you’d just have to change that before you ghosted.
In my opinion #2 is much easier so lets talk about that one since you’ve mentioned you have 6.5 installed on other machines.
First step is to select the program you are going to use to do the harddrive imaging. The cheapest (free) solution is Clonezilla (which I’ve used successfully on QNX drives). A paid solution is Paragon (which I’ve also used on QNX drives).
Next you need 2 USB thumbdrives. One to hold a bootable version of your imaging program (Clonezilla/Paragon etc) and one to hold the image (hopefully your existing machine with QNX 6.5 isn’t too large and that a 64 gig thumbdrive can contain it all (they do compression so it can be bigger if most of the drive is empty).
Make 1 USB drive bootable that contains your imaging program (Clonezilla/Paragon). This is straightforward and there is easy instructions to follow to do this.
Plug your bootable USB drive into your existing 6.5 machine and then boot from the USB drive. Follow the instructions to take an image of the harddrive (where QNX resides) onto your 2nd USB thumbdrive.
Plug your bootable USB drive into your Liger board and boot from the USB drive. Restore the QNX image into the harddrive of the Liger board.
That should then boot QNX on the Liger board. You’ll have to turn on the IDE compatibility mode in the BIOS (like you did for the DVD drive). It should then boot into QNX. At that point you can log in and change the drivers for the Ethernet card and other hardware to match that of the Liger board instead of the system you took the QNX image from.
I tried a cloned drive from another machine and it actually did boot and recognize the hard drive. It was installed using the same DVD but I don’t recall anyone ever modifying drivers so why it boots and the install DVD locks up is a mystery.
Unfortunately the keyboard is inoperative after it boots. The old machines have PS2 and the new machine only has a USB based keyboard. So I’m kinda stuck again. Seems like I’m closer though.
The older machine image boots because the hard disk driver is the same for both machines (SATA using IDE compatibility mode). The install DVD uses different startup parameters when it tries to detect the hardware (something must cause an issue).
Since the cloned drive concept works, go back to the original 6.5 machine and start the USB drivers (io-hid, check the docs for what you have to do). I’m not sure if you start everything in your boot image or whether you do it from a script after the boot image runs. Either way, just get the io-hid driver running and then clone again and you should then have USB keyboard and mouse control.
I’ve disabled the eide and mvSATA drivers in the ifs boot image using my older Leopard machine. Seems the Liger doesn’t get along with the EIDE driver at all (Leopard requires it). It’s not needed anyway as the Liger is SATA-AHCI based (The mvSATA driver is unnecessary as well). But still, USB just doesn’t want to function after the OS boots. USB (Keyboard and memory sticks) work perfectly on the Leopard based system (io-usb, devu-kbd, and everything else is enabled in the ifs I build for the Liger) but just a whole lot of nothing when booting on the Liger.
I just noticed that the Versalogic Liger uses a Kaby Lake processor which has an xHCI USB controller. QNX 6.5.0 doesn’t seem to have the devu-xhci.so driver. This may be the root of my USB issues.
Contact your QNX rep directly (if you still have support) or ask on Foundry27 (QNX developers are there) if there is any xHCI support in a later unreleased io-usb (since your DVD is likely very old now).