Each time I try AMD graphics, something is fucked for me. Back with fglrx, fglrx just sucked, so I used Nvidia. Then I had an AMD right around when they finally had opensource drivers, but it was still buggy as hell. So I went with Nvidia again (first a GTX 790, then a GTX 1060). In the meantime I had a new work notebook where I also went with an AMD APU, and had driver crashes for a long time when I was in video calls and it had to decode multiple streams. That thankfully stabilized with Linux 6.4.
Since sooo many people in the community swear by AMD, I thought “dammit, let’s try it again for my new desktop” and got an 7800rx … and I have to reboot ~5 times until I finally make it to a running xserver or wayland session. Apparently I am hit by this problem (at least I hope so). But that doesn’t even read nice … the fix seems to be to revert another fix for powermanagement. So I either have a mostly non-booting card or suboptimal power management.
I start to regret having chosen AMD … again :-/ I seem to be cursed.
I am running Arch here as well. Most people who referenced that issue I linked also seem to come from Arch. So it seems like a problem due to the “latest” kernel. I don’t accept this as an excuse, though. It’s still a stable kernel an I don’t expect drivers to be published that were not tested in advance. And it looks like this has happened here. Maybe bad timing on my part and this was/is the only hiccup in a long time (see “cursed”), but I guess I’ll find out.
Having a bleeding edge kernel can and will come back to bite you. There’s a reason why many distros hold back with kernel updates for so long, there’s issues that only can be found with user feedback.
From experience, “stable” in the kernel world doesn’t mean much unfortunately. I encountered dozens of issues over various versions and different hardware already and it’s the main reason I don’t run rolling release distros on my main rig.
There’s also been enough times where the latest Nvidia driver borked my test system at work so I’m fine with just not running the latest kernel instead.
I have the same problem with the LTS kernel. Just tried. First time it booted but locked up on shutdown. The next cold boot it immediately went to black screen after loading amdgpu. (
[drm:amdgpu_gfx_enable_kcq [amdgpu]] *ERROR* KCQ enable failed
). Next boot too. All with kernel 6.6.14.That’s strange, 6.6.14 is the same version that’s on Fedora currently. My friend with a 7900 XTX is still on 6.5.0 so I can’t get him to test that version right now.
Fix is merged already though: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=9c2f0338bbd132a4b12b988004d796798609d297 Should hopefully not be long before it is backported.
In the linked issue the user
uncle jack
wroteSo I fear that there is still a deeper issue somewhere. But I’ll see what happens after those fixes get backported to 6.7 and hit archlinux. Until then I might have to live with Windows or don’t reboot too often. I have yet to figure out how long I need to keep this machine off the power for it to behave like a cold boot. 10s apparently didn’t cut it in my latest try (it’s a new PC so I still have to learn its quirks).