Minerva installation guide

DISCLAIMER

Whilst it is possible to run Minerva on physical x86-64-compatible hardware, it is not yet ready to be used by non-technical users who aren't prepared to report bugs or assist with its development. For this reason, there are currently no pre-built install images so a bare-metal installation requires that you build an installation image from source.

Hardware support and requirements

Storage-wise Minerva requires a >= 2 GB SATA, NVMe or USB drive. Only xHCI and UHCI USB host controllers are supported. A minimum of 256 MB RAM and a x86-64 CPU are required.

You must be willing to wipe your disk's contents to allow for writing the Minerva image so be sure to back up any important data on your disk first! Minerva uses the GRUB2 bootloader so it should be possible to multiboot it with any other OS that can be booted from GRUB2 post-installation.

At present there is no real GPU support so don't expect OpenGL, Vulkan nor accelerated video playback and encoding support. Minerva currently relies upon the multiboot or EFI GOP framebuffer on real hardware. There is no WiFi support and the network card chipsets that are currently supported: Intel e1000, Intel e1000e and Realtek 8168. The e1000 driver has only been tested with qemu and VirtualBox although it may work with NICs such as those using the Intel 82545XX, 82540XX, 82546XX or similar chipsets. Supported sound cards are Intel AC'97 and Intel HDA PCI devices.

Creating a Minerva GRUB disk image

Before creating a Minerva disk image, you need to build the OS as described in the Minerva build instructions. Follow those instructions up to and including running ninja install (Meta/minerva.sh image <arch>). After the OS has built, run ninja grub-uefi-image (for UEFI systems) or ninja grub-image (for legacy BIOS systems) to create a new file called grub_uefi_disk_image or grub_disk_image with GRUB2 installed that can be booted on a real PC. This command requires parted and grub2 (Arch: grub) to be installed.

The final step is copying grub_uefi_disk_image or grub_disk_image onto the disk you wish to use to boot Minerva using a command such as:

$ sudo dd if=grub_uefi_disk_image of=/dev/sdx bs=64M && sync

Replace /dev/sdx with the target device. The bs=64M argument is optional but will speed up the data transfer. You can also use any other image flashing application. Flashing under Windows is possible; you can find the WSL files under \\wsl$\<distro name>\<path to minerva directory>.

If you are using the BIOS disk image, you may need to tweak the root= boot parameter in the GRUB boot menu so it refers to the correct partition. See Boot Device Addressing for more details.

If you installed Minerva to a NVMe drive and it fails to initialize the drive, the nvme_poll boot parameter might help.

Troubleshooting Minerva boot issues with Linux using a null modem (serial) cable

Many guides on the internet recommend using screen to monitor or interact with a serial console under Linux. Using screen is an option but it is quite tricky to copy and paste the output from a screen console when there is more than one screens worth of text. So, unless you are already experienced with screen it is recommended you use cu.

After installing cu, you will not be able to connect to your serial console device until you have added your user to the dialout group. You must log out and log back in again after running a command such as:

$ sudo usermod -aG dialout YourLinuxUserName

Once you are logged in with a user who is a member of the dialout group, you can connect to a USB serial console using a command like:

$ cu -s 57600 -l /dev/ttyUSB0

Troubleshooting boot issues without a serial port

During the boot process, you should be able to see logging of important messages on the screen, printed solely by the kernel. If it happens to you that the system hangs, you should be able to see the last message on the screen. It can be either an assertion or kernel panic.

Setting a boot argument of graphics_subsystem_mode=limited will force the kernel to not initialize any framebuffer devices, hence allowing the system to boot into console-only mode as SystemServer will detect this condition and will not initialize WindowServer.

If you do not see any output, it's possible that the Kernel panics before any video is initialized. In that case, you might try debugging the init sequence with the PC speaker to see where it gets stuck.