On 12/27/20 12:19 AM, The Wanderer wrote: > 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. >
Hi, I'm not a hardware expert but I found the following on Internet: - the interface for this card is PCI-Express 4.0 and I guess that your old computer doesn't support that - BIOS Support - Dual UEFI - I'm not sure what this means but is it possible this card not to be supported by non-UEFI systems ? Kind regards Georgi
