Hey there, I just made a “new” pc and had my friend help me install fedora.
The system has an fx-8350, 16 gbs dddr 1336mhgz, and an R7 240 GPU.
I had installed discord, steam, gnome-tweaks, minecraft and cs:source on the system, mostly by copying commands off of google.
After turning off the system using the software shutdown button, I noticed that it was frozen with the fedora logo and the spinning circle(the circle was not spinning, it was frozen). After awhile, I decided to flip the power switch off and deal with whatever was going on in the morning. This morning, I tried booting into the system but I got no video output. I only see the grub menu and after that there is no output. The pc stays on and the keyboard and mouse have their lighting on.
Any advice on what to do? My friend is convinced I fucked with the system files or corrupted the system.
If I’m reading this chart correctly, you have a “Southern Islands” video card. Consequently, you will need to add amdgpu.si_support=1 to your kernel’s command line.
Thanks for the response, total linux noob here but how would I go about doing that? When I boot into the ssd I am only able to open into the grub console, is that something I could do there?
I don’t use GRUB, so I’m not completely sure, but I think you’ve probably hit c to open the console whereas you need to press e to edit the configuration. You’ll need to add that amdgpu.si_support=1 to the line that starts with linux and contains other kernel parameters such as quiet and rhgb. Then press crtl+x to continue booting with the modified configuration.
Note that changing the boot configuration this way will only make the change for that one boot of your PC. To make the change permanent, you will need to edit the /etc/default/grub configuration file and then run grub2-mkconfig -o /etc/grub2.cfg.
Thank you again, I tried this(I added the amdpu.si_support=1 to the end of the line that starts with linux) and still have the same issue. The screen shows the _ character a few times before the display enters sleep mode for a lack of video output. Is there anything else you recommend trying or should I just give up?
It still sounds like a problem with the video driver. You can try adding nomodeset to run the video card in “basic” graphics mode. In basic video mode, video playback might be slower because it will use the system’s CPU instead of its GPU and some advanced features such as 3D rendering (used in games) might not work (or will work poorly/slowly).
BTW, those parameters are quite sensitive to spacing and spelling. It looks like you made a typo here (not sure if you might have made a similar typo when you tried editing your GRUB configuration).
the nomodeset allowed it to boot, thank you so much. How would I go about making sure that it boots with a proper driver? I’m picking up an rx480 today for the system as well.
In most cases, Linux should autodetect the correct driver. Those Southern Islands and Sea Islands cards are a bit of a special case because AMD switched drivers right around the time they came out (from the “radeon” driver to the “amdgpu” driver) and, consequently, there is support for those cards in both drivers, but only one can be enabled at a time. Fedora Linux appears to disable the radeon driver by default, but it doesn’t enable support for those cards in the newer amdgpu driver. So Fedora Linux’s default configuration might be a bit buggy for those cards. It’s not your fault.
It looks like the Radeon RX 480 is an “Arctic Islands” card and it should be supported by the amdgpu driver by default (without futher configuration).
