Re: Can Guix support Zen 2/AMD Ryzen?

[jbranso@dismail.de]

I am kind of shooting from the hip here, others may be more knowledgeable than me, but here is my two cents.

As a general rule, any "brand new hardware" (except server grade hardware and Intel hardware) generally needs 3-6+ months before it has good Linux support.  So you may run into issues using the latest and greatest thing.

If you want a good GPU, then you might check out this: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-K2020-Low-End-Card   It's a $50 graphics card that works with the libre nvidia driver (nouveau).  I think you have to manually set the clock frequency though...All AMD graphics cards are virtually useless on the Linux libre kernel.  AMD has proprietary firmware, which Linux libre disables.  Nvidia is as bad.  I think the integrated graphics from Intel works fairly well with Linux libre.

I've also run into that booting issue.  I think there is a way to disable fancy graphics rendering during the installer, which is what I had to do, to get guix to run on my AMD APU a few years ago.  Maybe someone here can point out how to do that, because I'm blanking on the specifics.  

If you are trying to game on Linux libre, you will probably run into some issues.  :(

November 23, 2020 4:38 PM, "Jesse Gibbons" <jgibbons2357@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi guix,
> I built a guix image for a hardware enthusiast friend to try on his computers, in part to see how
> well/completely his more modern hardware would run guix and if it would be worth commissioning him
> to build me a computer. It successfully booted, but the screens turned blank and didn't show gdm.
> My friend tried this twice, and the same thing happened. He tried ctrl+alt+f{1..6} and didn't see
> anything (though he has a weird keyboard that requires him to hold a modifier key to enter any
> function key). He suggested it might be because his computer has a Ryzen CPU with the Zen 2
> Architecture, which he knows might need to work around. Since it booted fine, I think it might be
> more related to his Nvidia GPU. Is there anything I can do, without resorting to proprietary
> solutions, to make a guix image with a desktop at least displays with his hardware?
> -Jesse