Re: KMScon vs. AMD Radeon

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hi,

"pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)" <pelzflorian@pelzflorian.de> skribis:

> On Fri, Apr 19, 2019 at 05:17:31PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> OK, so that’s suboptimal, but do you still consider it usable
>> nonetheless?
>> 
>
> Yes, the installer is usable.  Its just when using Manual partitioning
> that the message
>
> You can change a disk's partition table by \
> selecting it and pressing ENTER. You can also edit a partition by selecting it \
> and pressing ENTER, or remove it by pressing DELETE. To create a new \
> partition, select a free space area and press ENTER.
>
>
> is clipped to
>
> ENTER. You can also edit a partition by selecting it \
> and pressing ENTER, or remove it by pressing DELETE. To create a new \
> partition, select a free space area and press ENTER.
>
> It is not very important.

OK, so I’ll push the “modprobe.blacklist=radeon” trick.

> The important remaining issue is that Xorg does not start on this
> computer.  Neither the radeon nor fbdev and not even vesa works, for
> whatever reason.  fbdev apparently is not supported.  VESA might be a
> fixable bug (it displays “(EE) VESA(0): Cannot read int vect” like
> <https://bugs.launchpad.net/xserver-xorg-driver-vesa/+bug/1432899>).
> On other AMD GPUs the results may be more successful.  I have not
> tried other free distributions on this PC yet.

So basically GNU/Linux distros in general fail to work on machines with
these GPUs?

> I believe issues with (some?) AMD GPUs should be mentioned in the
> manual.  Also, on the downloads page perhaps it should be mentioned
> that there may be issues with some hardware, referring users to the
> Hardware Considerations in the Guix manual.

We could do that, but these kind of kernel-side issues tend to appear
and vanish quickly, no?  But I don’t know much about these AMD GPU
issues, so I’m happy to do what people consider appropriate.

Thanks,
Ludo’.