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My Thinkpad E15 Gen 2 with AMD Ryzen 4500U (Radeon Renoir Graphics) hangs on boot when I enable the amdgpu driver and disable syscon (framebuffer). Hardware sup

by jbirer 6y ago

My Thinkpad E15 Gen 2 with AMD Ryzen 4500U (Radeon Renoir Graphics) hangs on boot when I enable the amdgpu driver and disable syscon (framebuffer). Hardware support is one of the big things that holds FreeBSD back.

the_only_law 6y ago
I once had a very bad idea to create a UEFI application that was basically a RDP client (for the hell of it ofc) Then I had to use a framebuffer driver with a BSD because it lacked GPU support for the machine I was on and dear god, the web was basically unusable. Put that idea in a coffin pretty quickly.
- toast0 6y ago
  It might not be that bad; there's a BLT api in the boot services that you could use as a UEFI application, but OSes can't use after calling ExitBootServices. UEFI has a network api too (which I've seen people disparage, but might be usable enough). I have other crazy ideas though, so I won't steal yours. :)
netflixandkill 6y ago
It's anything but the largest projects really. Even mainstream linux support for a lot of laptops is still iffy. Too much work for too few people and fewer willing to pay to make it happen. It will be interesting to see if further ARM penetration into what was historically Windows-or-Mac only portions of the laptop market helps with that.
floatboth 6y ago
Renoir is a bit too new for us since the official drm version is 5.4, you currently have to build the 5.5-wip branch of drm-kmod for it to work. Also, I've fixed the framebuffer thing, you no longer have to disable it!! (Not everybody even had to ever do it. The issue was that we did not disable our simple framebuffer when the driver expected it (our Linux compat layer would only try to kill other Linux framebuffers) so our framebuffer would literally just overwrite device memory that the driver was using to initialize all the GPU firmware. On my Vega card, this would only happen at 1440p/4K. With smaller EFI framebuffer resolution, the memory would luckily not overlap :D)
- jbirer 6y ago
  Thanks for the response, it's great to have developers respond to the community. I have made another attempt today using 5.5-wip and experimental hardware support enabled through loader.conf, to no avail. I think I will wait some time for things to become more mature. Right now I have a Macbook M1 machine so I can cope by saying I have BSD under the hood :)

by jbirer 6y ago

the_only_law 6y ago

I once had a very bad idea to create a UEFI application that was basically a RDP client (for the hell of it ofc) Then I had to use a framebuffer driver with a BSD because it lacked GPU support for the machine I was on and dear god, the web was basically unusable. Put that idea in a coffin pretty quickly.

toast0 6y ago
It might not be that bad; there's a BLT api in the boot services that you could use as a UEFI application, but OSes can't use after calling ExitBootServices. UEFI has a network api too (which I've seen people disparage, but might be usable enough). I have other crazy ideas though, so I won't steal yours. :)

netflixandkill 6y ago

It's anything but the largest projects really. Even mainstream linux support for a lot of laptops is still iffy. Too much work for too few people and fewer willing to pay to make it happen. It will be interesting to see if further ARM penetration into what was historically Windows-or-Mac only portions of the laptop market helps with that.

floatboth 6y ago

Renoir is a bit too new for us since the official drm version is 5.4, you currently have to build the 5.5-wip branch of drm-kmod for it to work. Also, I've fixed the framebuffer thing, you no longer have to disable it!! (Not everybody even had to ever do it. The issue was that we did not disable our simple framebuffer when the driver expected it (our Linux compat layer would only try to kill other Linux framebuffers) so our framebuffer would literally just overwrite device memory that the driver was using to initialize all the GPU firmware. On my Vega card, this would only happen at 1440p/4K. With smaller EFI framebuffer resolution, the memory would luckily not overlap :D)

jbirer 6y ago
Thanks for the response, it's great to have developers respond to the community. I have made another attempt today using 5.5-wip and experimental hardware support enabled through loader.conf, to no avail. I think I will wait some time for things to become more mature. Right now I have a Macbook M1 machine so I can cope by saying I have BSD under the hood :)