Boot on an unsupported GPU?

wastlnd

Hi guys, I’m on an Intel Meteor Lake 7d45 All-in-one PC, I can’t boot the live iso because it reboots after the message “Setting up (Intel DRM)…Please wait” . Unfortunately, this seems to point to an unsupported GPU. My question is: is there anything else I could try? Something like booting on scfb? Sorry but I’m really new to BSD and I don’t know how to handle the kernel parameters.

vimanuelt

It is my understanding, most Intel Meteor Lake graphics chips, like the one in your Core Ultra 7 155H computer, do not yet work well with GhostBSD or FreeBSD 14. These systems are still catching up when it comes to supporting the newest Intel graphics.

vimanuelt

Try This First: Boot with Basic Graphics (scfb)

Start your computer with the GhostBSD USB plugged in.
When the GhostBSD boot menu appears (with the logo and countdown), press the spacebar to stop the countdown.
Press e to edit the boot settings.

Look for the line that starts with something like:

kernel ...

At the end of that line, type this exactly:

drm.disable=1

Press the Enter key to go back to the menu.
Then press b to boot.

This tells GhostBSD not to use the fancy graphics system, and instead use the simple one.

vimanuelt

If That Does Not Work: Try Console Mode

Restart your computer and go back to the GhostBSD boot menu.
Press 3 to choose single-user mode.

When you see a prompt (a line with #), type the following commands one by one, pressing Enter after each:

mount -u /
mount -a
service devd start

Then try to start the desktop by typing: startx

Godspeed.

wastlnd

Thank you, unfortunately I tried both methods but 1) pressing the e key doesn't do anything and 2) after booting in single user and typing the commands that you wrote, I get: *service: not found ". Maybe I didn’t get the live system mounted?

vimanuelt

wastlnd
I apologize for not being able to resolve the issue. If I had access to hardware similar to yours, I might have been able to reproduce the problem and contribute code upstream to address it directly.

I have reached out to both the FreeBSD Foundation and the FreeBSD Core Team in the past to ask how development support could be improved, but unfortunately received no response. If I had the financial means, I would gladly invest in resolving it myself.

vpx

I have the same problem but with the amdgpu driver. The AMD Raphael Navi II RDNA 2.0 IGPU of my EPYC 4344P is also too new for FreeBSD.

Enable the verbose output in the boot options then you will at least have a more detailed output of what is going on.

wastlnd

@vimanuelt no problem, don't need to apologize, you offered your help and I really appreciate it. @vpx unfortunately I looked for more information about my CPU and it looks like the situation is not good. The Intel Meteor Lake Ultra Core 5 7d45 CPU is not supported at all by the drm-61-kmod driver (that GhostBSD uses). The drm-66-kmod driver that's available on FreeBSD 15.0 should support Meteor Lake but it looks like it doesn't support my specific model 7d45 (I tried to boot the CURRENT iso with drm-66-kmod and it failed). For completeness' sake, I should add that even the Linux 6.6 kernel had to be force probed to make this CPU work, so I may really be out of luck and should give up unless I buy an AMD machine. Chances are my current hw will never be supported.

vimanuelt

I suspect it may take 3 to 5 years for FreeBSD devs to catch up, but I might be wrong. It might be best to ask on the FreeBSD mailing list.

vpx

I didn't know what you were talking about with "7d45" until I researched the Meteor Lake-P IGPUs on https://bsd-hardware.info, these are the device IDs for the IGPUs:

0x7d45 and 0x7d55.
Device Hunt

These are not listed in pci_video_intel. I can see though that Meteor Lake definitions are already in the i915 driver source.

I guess the kernel modules are also missing, I don't see a gpu-firmware-intel-kmod-meteorlake, gpu-firmware-intel-kmod-dg2 (Xe Alchemist) or gpu-firmware-intel-kmod-dg3 (Xe2 Elasti).

vimanuelt

vpx
If you observe them in FreeBSD 15-CURRENT, it's likely that the drivers will be back-ported. To determine when the back-port will be officially released, you should reach out to the FreeBSD mailing list for further information. :-)

wastlnd

Hey guys there's a problem: the gpu support for meteor lake is indeed in drm-66-kmod, so I guess it's ported from the Linux 6.6 kernel driver. However, even when booting Linux distros with 6.6 I had to force probe my 7d45 CPU because the support was still experimental before 6.7. So I'm afraid that @vimanuelt is right...I already tried to boot 15.0 after installing drm-66-kmod , it failed.