The officially official Devuan Forum!

forsoothplays

Member

Registered: Today

Posts: 1  

Devuan Won't Load Firmware AMD Radeon 7700S

Hi, all.

Recently wanted to adopt Devuan as the Linux side of my dual-boot setup on my new Framework 16 with a dGPU. However, I've found that Devuan (and most other Linux distros) are having difficulty loading the firmware for my dGPU ever since I updated the BIOS from the version shipped with the hardware (3.04) to the latest stable version (4.01). Because of this I was able to load Devuan successfully booting with the  `nomodeset` option, but into a black screen when booting normally.

I am already in a conversation with Framework support. But I am posting the same information I am giving them here in case anybody here can give further insight on whether I can get Devuan working as I would really like to use Devuan specifically.

Hardware:

- Win11 on drive 1
- <Linux> on drive 0
- CPU: AMD AI 9 HX 370
- GPU: AMD Radeon RX 7700S

Build:

https://frame.work/share-my-laptop?token=d458aeececb

The manufacturer suggests that dual-booting with Windows might be causing the problem, but I just got done troubleshooting this (removing the storage drives and booting from live usb sessions) and this does not seem to be a factor.

The problem is not unique to Devuan but I am asking here because ideally Devuan is the distro I want to use.

Distributions that load the firmware correctly (first value with storage drives deployed, second value storage drives undeployed)

Artix: false, false
Fedora: true, true
Pop!_OS: true, prolly*
EndeavourOS: false, false

*This was installed on the drive at the time and I only have three flash drives to work with. Since Pop!_OS loads correctly with the drives deployed I assume it loads correctly with the drives undeployed.

N.B. Fedora, Pop!_OS, and EndeavourOS are listed as supported distributions by the manufacturer.

Any help troubleshooting this would be appreciated. Thank you.

delgado

Member

Registered: 2022-07-14

Posts: 296  

Re: Devuan Won't Load Firmware AMD Radeon 7700S

Welcome!

Did you have the respective firmware packages installed?

apt list | grep ^firmware

With a relatively new notebook, devuan freia (testing) can be better choice than excalibur (stable).