Debian and firmware

Re:Debian and firmware by tremon on Tuesday April 19, 2022 @06:33AM (#31081436)

This isn't what the radeon driver does for AMD gpu's, and hasn't for years: loading the driver automatically enables the full rendering engine and disables the VESA modes, even if no firmware has been loaded. Which means that on a normal system with radeon.ko present but not the firmware files, you get a few seconds of kernel output followed by a black screen. For the systems where I don't want the firmware (servers), I must be very careful to blacklist the radeon driver or I completely lose the local console.

This has been the case since the SI chipsets in 2012. I'm not sure if the fault lies fully with the driver, maybe the hardware doesn't allow querying the state of the engine firmware before enabling the engine.

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Re:Debian and firmware by anthk on Tuesday April 19, 2022 @06:53AM (#31081535)

The Radeon module works on non-accelerated mode with the modesetting driver instead of the xorg Radeon one.

At /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-radeon.conf:

     Section "Device"
 identifier "Radeon"
 Driver "modesetting"
    EndSection

Bugs may arise, maybe it could be a good idea to disable the Composite extension too.

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Re:Debian and firmware by tremon on Tuesday April 19, 2022 @11:05AM (#31084122)

I guess I confused the issue by referring it as the "radeon driver", but I meant to implicate the radeon.ko kernel module, not the radeon(4) Xorg driver. The servers I'm talking about don't even have X installed (they're Ceph OSD nodes).

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Re:Debian and firmware by anthk on Tuesday April 19, 2022 @11:09AM (#31084181)

Linux libre here. I ran Trisquel on TTY mode to debug issues, I modprobed the radeon module and KMS switched the resolution to a native one in a laptop. Starting X with the radeon driver for X messes everything garbled up. The modesetting driver works, but no GL.

TTY works well before and after KMS.

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