Re: KMScon vs. AMD Radeon

[Mathieu Othacehe <m.othacehe@gmail.com>]

I did test the patch on my hardware (kmscon with forced fbdev backend):

* By default, kmscon is loaded, everything seems ok.
* Passing nomodeset to the kernel, kmscon hangs with a black screen, but
I'm able to switch to other mingetty terminals.

Not sure what is going wrong, but I fear it won't be much better on your
AMD GPUs :(

Mathieu

Mathieu Othacehe writes:

> Hi all,
>
> Thanks for your investigation Danny. Florian and Pierre, could you try
> this new patch :) ?
>
> If it fails, you can also try to press 'e' in GRUB and add 'nomodeset'
> to the kernel command line arguments.
>
> Thanks for your help,
>
> Mathieu
>
> From f90ea22ee4af2db11587b6195c3726f9bab9ec78 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: Mathieu Othacehe <m.othacehe@gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2019 09:31:31 +0200
> Subject: [PATCH] wip: Disable drm backend for install kmscon.
>
> ---
>  gnu/packages/terminals.scm | 9 +++++++++
>  gnu/system/install.scm     | 2 ++
>  2 files changed, 11 insertions(+)
>
> diff --git a/gnu/packages/terminals.scm b/gnu/packages/terminals.scm
> index 2d46585865..740443aab1 100644
> --- a/gnu/packages/terminals.scm
> +++ b/gnu/packages/terminals.scm
> @@ -40,6 +40,7 @@
>    #:use-module (guix download)
>    #:use-module (guix git-download)
>    #:use-module (guix packages)
> +  #:use-module (guix utils)
>    #:use-module (gnu packages)
>    #:use-module (gnu packages autotools)
>    #:use-module (gnu packages check)
> @@ -308,6 +309,14 @@ multi-seat support, a replacement for @command{mingetty}, and more.")
>        (supported-systems (filter (cut string-suffix? "-linux" <>)
>                                   %supported-systems)))))
>  
> +(define-public kmscon-fbdev-only
> +  (package
> +    (inherit kmscon)
> +    (name "kmscon-fbdev-only")
> +    (arguments
> +     `(#:configure-flags '("--with-video=fbdev")
> +       ,@(package-arguments kmscon)))))
> +
>  (define-public libtermkey
>    (package
>      (name "libtermkey")
> diff --git a/gnu/system/install.scm b/gnu/system/install.scm
> index aad1deb913..6d0d7cfd48 100644
> --- a/gnu/system/install.scm
> +++ b/gnu/system/install.scm
> @@ -45,6 +45,7 @@
>    #:use-module (gnu packages cryptsetup)
>    #:use-module (gnu packages package-management)
>    #:use-module (gnu packages disk)
> +  #:use-module (gnu packages terminals)
>    #:use-module (gnu packages texinfo)
>    #:use-module (gnu packages compression)
>    #:use-module (gnu packages nvi)
> @@ -232,6 +233,7 @@ You have been warned.  Thanks for being so brave.\x1b[0m
>  
>            (service kmscon-service-type
>                     (kmscon-configuration
> +                    (kmscon kmscon-fbdev-only)
>                      (virtual-terminal "tty1")
>                      (login-program (installer-program))))