Dear manjaro Team,
A few days ago I installed a new disk on my computer, and I was about to reinstall Manjaro (what else?) when I thought I should try the Sway spin. I have a laptop with an RTX2060m GPU, from whose DisplayPort I output an external display, so I was anticipating issues; and issues I found.
Starting the live ISO with the external display connected did not result in a succesful initialization, either with the open or the proprietary drivers. Without the external display there were no issues. After initialization, the external display output was detected, but I could not enable it. In the case of the open drivers, I was able to use the external display with WLR_DRM_DEVICES=/dev/dri/card0:/dev/dri/card1 sway. I put this here so that it may help anyone with a similar setup. Nevertheless, from what I have read, it may not be possible to use the external display AND have proprietary NVIDIA drivers, which I need for work-related computation. Back to i3 we go.
I booted the i3 community spin (I did this last week, and the download pointed to manjaro-i3-25.0.0-250417-linux614.iso, but now it points to a more recent build, with the 6.12 kernel), and launched the installer, and the horror, there was an error towards the end of the installation. The logs suggested an issue with the crc32c_intel. A quick google search showed that
As of Linux kernel 6.14, it’s no longer necessary (nor recommended) to list crc32c_intel or crc32c_generic in mkinitcpio.conf. The kernel now detects hardware support and automatically uses the most efficient CRC32C implementation — typically crc32c-x86 on CPUs with SSE4.2 or similar.
source: [Solved] 6.14.1-arch1-1: module crc32c_intel error / Kernel & Hardware / Arch Linux Forums
I fooled around the installer files (I never really thought about how live system work), and I found a reference to crc32c-intel in /usr/lib/calamares/modules/initcpiocfg/main.py. Changing that to crc32c removed the issue.
tldr:
- While trying to make sway work in my setup, I found a partial solution for enabling an external monitor connected to a Nvidia GPU.
- I am very grateful to whoever is maintaining the i3 Manjaro spin; due to my hardware configuration (and my love for tiling WMs), it is of tremendous use to me.
- Although I am largely ignorant of how the community spins are managed, I would like to contribute by pointing out the small bug in the i3 edition installer (possibly already fixed), which only manifests when installing on a BTRFS file system, on kernel >= 6.14, and has a very simple fix.
- While making sure about version numbers for this post, I realized that the i3 spin now points out to a newer build, with kernel 6.12, so I guess the whole post is pointless now. Sorry for that.
I was not sure where to post this, as I wanted to give some background and motivate two questions:
- Is it relevant to include the
WLR_DRM_DEVICES=/dev/dri/card0:/dev/dri/card1 swayfix anywhere (forum, wiki)? - Has the issue with the installer in
manjaro-i3-25.0.0-250417-linux614.isobeen fixed? If not, would it be relevant to submit a bug report, or provide relevant feedback, PR…?
Kind regards, and thank you for your time