Radeon drivers, Fedora 34 & Wayland

Hi there,

I have an older amdgpu (radeon 5830) that is currently appearing to be unsupported by the Fedora 34 kernel. When I attempted to do a fresh install, it appeared that the gpu was not discovered after init processes and I was faced with a black screen. I removed the gpu and installed just fine.

Now my question is-- how can I get this thing working with Wayland? Will I need to build myself a custom kernel or does Fedora provide binaries for this kind of thing? A lot of the guides I’m seeing are oriented toward X systems. I’m new to Fedora but no stranger to Linux tinkering.

Please let me know if there’s any more info I can provide. Thanks!

I found an old post that stated that adding radeon.dpm=0 to the kernel command line would get HD 5800 series cards to work:

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/how-to-install-amd-drivers-on-fedora/62706/6?u=glb

P.S. I don’t think editing grubenv is the right way to adjust the kernel options with grub. I think you are suppose to either use grubby or edit /etc/default/grub and run grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg (or /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg if on a UEFI system).

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If you need more info about dpm, check ATI - ArchWiki section about Powersaving.

@glb I think you’re right about the editing part, but it did the trick back then. :+1:

Just FYI in case anyone is wondering why not to edit grubenv directly, although it appears to just contain plain text, it is actually a weird hack with very special sector alignment requirements. As I recall, it has to be exactly 1024 bytes in size and it has to be placed on consecutive 512 byte sectors of the disk. These requirements allow the grub bootloader to access the file “directly” from the disk before the operating system is loaded. If you edit the file with any old editor, it can break the requirements and, potentially, grub will be unable to parse the file. Since the file contains potentially necessary kernel parameters, you might even end up with an unbootable system.

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