On Tue, 12 Oct 2021 12:52:46 -0400 Philip McGrath <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi folks, > > I'm trying to install Guix System on real hardware for the first > time, and I'm having some graphics trouble. > > The machine has an older Asus M5A78L-M/USB3 motherboard with an > onboard Radeon HD 3000 GPU---the R600 family, IIUC, so covered by the > `radeon` driver rather than `amdgpu`. I understand that functionality > will be limited since I'm not using nonfree firmware, and I can live > with that. > > I've tried Debian 11 on this board (without "nonfree"), and, after > noting the missing firmware, it falls back to work acceptably with > `llvmpipe`. > > Unfortunately, Guix System is working less well. When it starts the > display manager (I've tried both GDM and SDDM, with both X11 and > Wayland), the screen goes blank permanently, and the logs show that > starting the X server fails: initially with an error about an > undefined symbol `exaGetPixmapDriverPrivate`, though through various > incantations on the kernel command line or in the X configuration I > can produce other errors, like "X: ../include/privates.h:121: > dixGetPrivateAddr: Assertion `key->initialized' failed." > > Can I configure Guix to give up on the missing firmware and just use > `llvmpipe`, as Debian does? > > Or, of course, if there's something even better I should do, I'd be > glad to hear about that! > > Thanks, > Philip > Just a hunch but maybe you could blacklist the broken firmware on the kernel command line arguments. I think it's something like modprobe.blacklist=radeon,amdgpu? Sorry, I can't look into it more right now, but that should give you some keywords to search for and maybe find the proper docs.
