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Re: No GRUB with brand-new GPU



On 2020-12-27 at 07:10, The Wanderer wrote:

> On 2020-12-27 at 02:51, Sven Joachim wrote:
> 
>> On 2020-12-26 18:44 -0500, The Wanderer wrote:

>>> That's a good suggestion, except I don't see any way to do that
>>> in the /etc/default/grub I have.
>>> 
>>> The closest thing I see is
>>> 
>>> # Uncomment to disable graphical terminal (grub-pc only) 
>>> #GRUB_TERMINAL=console
>>> 
>>> but that says it's for grub-pc only, i.e. the "legacy" version
>>> of grub, whereas I'm running grub2.
>> 
>> No, grub-pc is not the legacy version of grub, it is grub2 for 
>> legacy computers without EFI.  The version of grub2 for modern
>> UEFI systems is grub-efi-amd64 which uses the framebuffer set up by
>> the system's firmware (hence, no traditional text mode).
> 
> Ah, thanks for that correction; that does ring a bell now that you 
> mention it.
> 
> That would explain why this would be effective. I've made that change
> in this file; as soon as I reach a point in my operations where
> shutting down again is reasonable, I'll test to confirm that I can
> boot that way with the old GPU (and what behavior difference there
> may be with that change), and assuming it works will swap GPUs and
> see what I get.

No joy. It works fine with the old GPU (better, actually, in that the
GRUB menu doesn't take several seconds to draw; the lower boot-menu
resolution is no hardship), but if anything the behavior with the new
GPU is *worse*; I think I got the keyboard freeze even earlier on my
first try with the new configuration, although it seems to have gone
back to happening at the handover on subsequent attempts,

I then went into the BIOS to check it over again, and found that an
option for "BIOS EHCI handoff" was set to enabled, with the apparent
meaning that the BIOS would take care of handing over USB EHCI control
to the booted system rather than relying on the OS to handle that. On
the presumption that modern Linux should be able to handle this itself,
I disabled that setting; my USB devices are working fine now with the
old GPU, but on the new it left me with no apparent change.

That may be worth paying more attention to: this isn't just a
black-screen hang, it's a more full-system hang. The keyboard lights
stay in whatever state they were in immediately prior to the handover,
and nothing responds to the keyboard at all.


I did also confirm that the BIOS version is 1402, which is the version
number of the final BIOS released for this motherboard back in 2012. If
the BIOS needing updates to work with this GPU is the problem, then I'm
SOL.

Still, again, if that were the problem I'd expect there to be no display
output during POST and in the BIOS...

I need to get that live-boot medium ready and do those tests.

-- 
   The Wanderer

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.         -- George Bernard Shaw

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