Very Frustrated

Help with graphics cards on GhostBSD.
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jcpollman
Posts: 27
Joined: Sat Dec 07, 2019 11:17 am

Very Frustrated

Post by jcpollman »

I can not get a usable graphical desktop going with Ghost/Freebsd

Hardware: Ryzen cpu, RX580 video card, plenty of ram, UEFI. I have tried the latest official release of Ghost and Freebsd.

Linux and Windows have no problems with this setup

I have been able to kind of get a graphical desktop 2 ways:
1) Using SCFB. Works fine, but can only display 1024x768. Maybe when I get old, this will be fine, but on a 27 inch screen it is unusable. Is there anyway to change this? Xrandr only gives 1024x768.
2) Using VESA, I can get a full 2550x1440 screen, but the screen refreshes at about every 2 seconds – videos are completely unwatchable

From the command line I have typed: X -configure. And I get: AMDGPU [KMS] drm report modesetting isn’t supported. The Xorg log file shows: No screens found

I have added hw.syscons.disable=1 to my loader.conf. It completely locks up my computer.

I have been using Linux as my desktop for about 30 years, so the unix-like environment is not an issue. I even have Ghostbsd running nicely in a virtualbox in linux – complete with KDE.

I would like to switch to Ghost/Freebsd, but without a usable desktop I can not. I even upgraded my video card as several folks online have been able to make it work – but not me.

Thoughts?
JC
Vermilion
Posts: 86
Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2020 5:52 am

Re: Very Frustrated

Post by Vermilion »

Try this, here has been found a solution (last post)

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/rx-5 ... 905/page-2
aht0
Posts: 7
Joined: Thu Apr 25, 2019 1:25 pm

Re: Very Frustrated

Post by aht0 »

You'll need to install drm v5.0 (https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/kms-d ... sd12.1.zip and https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/kms-f ... master.zip)

Before doing anything with them, get GhostBSD's sources (install git first. Then issue git clone https://github.com/ghostbsd/ghostbsd.git /usr/src)
To be on the safe side, build new kernel out of the sources and install. Dunno, maybe it'd have some minor difference compared to installed system.

Unpack the kms-drm and kms-firmware zips.

Then, first build and install kms-firmware then follow it up buy building and installing kms-drm from source.

If /etc/rc.conf file does not yet have row containing kld_list entry then add kld_list="amdgpu". When it's already there with some other content, just add amdgpu to the row, leaving empty space between your entry and it's previous items.

example:

Code: Select all

kld_list="linux linux64 cuse amdgpu"
Open /etc/X11/xorg.conf in text editor, replace Driver "scfb" with Driver "amdgpu", save, exit. Reboot.

Works with Vega discrete graphics, should equally work with Polaris cards.
inf3rno
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Jan 29, 2021 12:33 am

Re: Very Frustrated

Post by inf3rno »

jcpollman wrote: Wed Feb 19, 2020 4:54 pm I can not get a usable graphical desktop going with Ghost/Freebsd

Hardware: Ryzen cpu, RX580 video card, plenty of ram, UEFI. I have tried the latest official release of Ghost and Freebsd.

Linux and Windows have no problems with this setup

I have been able to kind of get a graphical desktop 2 ways:
1) Using SCFB. Works fine, but can only display 1024x768. Maybe when I get old, this will be fine, but on a 27 inch screen it is unusable. Is there anyway to change this? Xrandr only gives 1024x768.
2) Using VESA, I can get a full 2550x1440 screen, but the screen refreshes at about every 2 seconds – videos are completely unwatchable

From the command line I have typed: X -configure. And I get: AMDGPU [KMS] drm report modesetting isn’t supported. The Xorg log file shows: No screens found

I have added hw.syscons.disable=1 to my loader.conf. It completely locks up my computer.

I have been using Linux as my desktop for about 30 years, so the unix-like environment is not an issue. I even have Ghostbsd running nicely in a virtualbox in linux – complete with KDE.

I would like to switch to Ghost/Freebsd, but without a usable desktop I can not. I even upgraded my video card as several folks online have been able to make it work – but not me.

Thoughts?
JC
I managed to do this with FreeBSD 12.2 (GhostBSD depends on this version), but it was far from trivial. https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/how- ... 2-2.78148/ You need to build the drm-fbsd12.0-kmod from source and use hw.syscons.disable=1. As of GhostBSD I reported that it does not work and they can fix it this way, but they did not care. Which is weird, because I got the impression that this OS should work out of the box without this kind of tinkering. In theory from FreeBSD 13 we won't have this problem. It will be released in a few months: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.0R/schedule/ but I don't know how fast GhostBSD will move to 13.x.
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