LinuxMusicians

Hope this is the right forum to post this problem. I’ve been using AVLinux (mx21) on a new build I share with my son and all things were running very well for a long time when suddenly my son tells me the screen went black and will no longer boot.

I asked my son what happened exactly beforehand and he mentioned that our cat walked across the keyboard lol. Well I tried a few things like booting into other various partitions through grub and they all stalled at “waiting for /dev to be fully populated”

Researching brought me to try various workarounds to where we wound up adding nomodeset and adding our screen resolution to gfxwhatever. That works well except for one thing: it lags considerably on gaming. Like I said we share the computer, he likes to game and make videos and I record audio. We have an Amd 590 GPU so it normally plays video very well however now it is very laggy and sometimes simply won’t load games for him.

Nomodeset seemed to work decently until we tried to load a game so I can only assume we switched to integrated graphics. The machine is an older server tower that has 2x e5-2630 cpu and 64gb ram, actually a robust machine. I’m just wondering what the hell the cat did to invoke a black screen of death?! Perhaps he triggered an update that screwed the Amd drivers or a new kernel that doesn’t play well? Any advice is very appreciated

From askubuntu (different distro, I know):

"Many open source drivers have removed support for non-kernel mode setting, so in those cases when you use nomodeset you will end up falling back to the very basic VESA unaccelerated driver."

Maybe a reinstallation of the GPU drivers is in order?

Could it be that the cat interrupted an update?

Hi,

If you type this in a terminal it will list the Video devices and drivers they are using:

inxi --graphics

Further to that, I know it's a pain in the butt to join yet another forum but it may be worth posting your issue on the MX Linux forum in the Respins section. Many of the non-multimedia technical questions get answered there and I'm no expert on Graphics issues etc..

https://forum.mxlinux.org/viewforum.php?f=127

I’ve been digging a bit deeper today and I found that the drivers aren’t being loaded. I used lshw -c display which returns a message that shows there is no drivers for video. Also by running radeontop it says there are no Amd gpus. I went and reinstalled all the associated drivers but weirdly it had no effect.

More research brought me to a page that states and just uploaded some kernel patches for x11.5 on 8/17/23 so I’m guessing that maybe my son updated and that patch screwed me. Gmaq, I’ll take a look at mx forum if I can’t get this back by tonight. Thanks

Aha! I just tried the inxi —graphics command and it gives a much better output than lshw. “Driver:n/a” “unloaded:Radeon” haha I’m getting somewhere already