I have for some years been running Debian with an older model of AMD GPU (Radeon HD 6870) for graphics.
I recently purchased a relatively recent model of GPU (Radeon RX 5700 XT), and today swapped it in and attempted to boot with it. I was expecting to get no graphics support (e.g., X, et cetera) until after adjusting some combination of installed driver- and firmware-related packages, module-blacklist settings, boot-time options, initrd state, GRUB configuration, and possibly other (again, e.g., X) config files. I'm generally fine with wrangling that, and based on my pre-swap research, was expecting to be able to get up and running with the new GPU today. What I got, instead, was not even that far. With the new GPU in place, I get video output during POST and in the BIOS (yes, this machine is old enough that it doesn't have a UEFI) without problems. That demonstrates that the GPU isn't dead on arrival, and that signal is getting through to the monitor on a basic level. However, as soon as the machine tries to hand over control to the bootloader, I get a hard freeze; the screen goes black (albeit I think still with backlight), the keyboard light toggle keys stop responding, and the GRUB menu never appears. Waiting a long time doesn't change anything; even after roughly half an hour of waiting, pressing the Power button once (no press-and-hold) shuts the system off immediately, which indicates that the system hasn't progressed much (if at all) past early boot. Thus far, Google has not been helpful. I find plenty about black screens after GRUB, but very little about before GRUB and after POST, and what little I find is from other distros - some Ubuntu (earlier versions, mostly 2010-era), some Arch, some RHEL - which don't necessarily handle either graphics drivers or GRUB in a way that will let their directions reliably translate to Debian. Any suggestions for what to try? I'm back up now with the old GPU, since researching this on my smartphone was going nowhere. I've dug into /etc/grub* and /boot/ looking for anything which seemed related, with no promising hits yet. Barring other discoveries, my current next step is to dig up a suitably recent Debian-based live-boot environment, boot to that, and see what it does. If it gives me usable graphics, I want to see what it's doing at bootloader time, and what parts I might be able to transpose into my primary install. However, given that live-boot setups don't always handle the early parts of boot the same way as hard-drive installs do, I'm not positive this will be fruitful. Also, given how relatively new this card is, I'm not sure I'll be able to find a suitable environment which does work with it to the level I need. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
