Recently, after attempting to boot my machine I was hit with a really concerning screen. All I see is my mouse cursor, but my screen remains black (I think this means X started, but the GDM greeter maybe didn’t?). I can switch TTYs and log in to those successfully, but despite all my poking and prodding, I’ve been unable to get to my login screen.
I’ve tried both Kernel 5.4 and 5.8, and even tried the ‘fallback initramfs’ boot options, to no avail.
I’ve run sudo pacman -Syu
from one of those other TTYs, and even tried jumping on the unstable branch to see if this was some recently introduced bug that had already been fixed, no luck.
I updated my BIOS to include ‘AMD AGESA Combo-AM4 V2 1.0.8.0’, from Asrock’s website (their version 3.40 BIOS). No change.
I tried to log in via a LiveUSB with Manjaro Gnome 20.0.3 (Kernel 5.6), and Ubuntu 20.04.1 Desktop, both of which exhibit the same problem, which is the part that I find most unusual. I even tried Manjaro Gnome 19.0.2, with no luck. I can’t imagine there’s a code reason that different Live CDs over time would exhibit this behaviour. If I use different distros (tried NixOS [KDE] and Xubuntu [XFCE]) then I’m shown a GUI, as expected. I’m thinking this means I might have suffered a hardware failure, but not sure how to isolate which hardware is faulty, and not sure what Gnome in particular could be doing to reliably hit this problem. Tried both RAM sticks in isolation, no change. Moved the GPU to a different PCI slot, no change. Different Displayport slot, no change.
Here’s some info about my system;
System: Kernel: 5.8.1-3-MANJARO x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: N/A Console: tty 6 DM: GDM 3.36.3 Distro: Manjaro Linux
Machine: Type: Desktop Mobo: ASRock model: X570 Taichi serial: <filter> BIOS: American Megatrends v: P3.20 date: 06/12/2020
CPU: Topology: 12-Core model: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X bits: 64 type: MT MCP arch: Zen 2 L2 cache: 6144 KiB
flags: avx avx2 lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 sse4a ssse3 svm bogomips: 182489
Speed: 3611 MHz min/max: 2200/3800 MHz boost: enabled Core speeds (MHz): 1: 3610 2: 2058 3: 2198 4: 2200 5: 3599
6: 2051 7: 2048 8: 2193 9: 2200 10: 2196 11: 2196 12: 2199 13: 2057 14: 2200 15: 2193 16: 2192 17: 2198 18: 2200
19: 2200 20: 2199 21: 2194 22: 2200 23: 2200 24: 2198
Graphics: Device-1: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Navi 10 [Radeon RX 5600 OEM/5600 XT / 5700/5700 XT] vendor: XFX Pine
driver: amdgpu v: kernel bus ID: 0f:00.0 chip ID: 1002:731f
Display: server: X.org 1.20.8 compositor: gnome-shell driver: amdgpu,ati unloaded: modesetting,radeon
alternate: fbdev,vesa tty: 240x67
Message: Advanced graphics data unavailable in console. Try -G --display
Audio: Device-1: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Navi 10 HDMI Audio driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel bus ID: 0f:00.1
chip ID: 1002:ab38
Device-2: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Starship/Matisse HD Audio vendor: ASRock driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel
bus ID: 11:00.4 chip ID: 1022:1487
Sound Server: ALSA v: k5.8.1-3-MANJARO
Network: Device-1: Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200 driver: iwlwifi v: kernel bus ID: 06:00.0 chip ID: 8086:2723
IF: wlp6s0 state: up mac: <filter>
Device-2: Intel I211 Gigabit Network vendor: ASRock driver: igb v: 5.6.0-k port: f000 bus ID: 08:00.0
chip ID: 8086:1539
IF: enp8s0 state: down mac: <filter>
Drives: Local Storage: total: 9.56 TiB used: 726.70 GiB (7.4%)
ID-1: /dev/nvme0n1 vendor: Corsair model: Force MP600 size: 931.51 GiB speed: 63.2 Gb/s lanes: 4 serial: <filter>
rev: EGFM11.1 scheme: MBR
ID-2: /dev/sda vendor: Western Digital model: WD10EALX-009BA0 size: 931.51 GiB speed: 6.0 Gb/s serial: <filter>
rev: 1H15 scheme: MBR
ID-3: /dev/sdb vendor: Crucial model: CT512M550SSD1 size: 476.94 GiB speed: 6.0 Gb/s serial: <filter> rev: MU01
scheme: GPT
ID-4: /dev/sdc vendor: Seagate model: ST8000VN0022-2EL112 size: 7.28 TiB speed: 6.0 Gb/s rotation: 7200 rpm
serial: <filter> rev: SC61 scheme: GPT
Partition: ID-1: / size: 882.01 GiB used: 178.82 GiB (20.3%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/dm-0
Swap: ID-1: swap-1 type: partition size: 34.42 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) priority: -2 dev: /dev/dm-1
Sensors: System Temperatures: cpu: 41.8 C mobo: N/A gpu: amdgpu temp: 46 C
Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A gpu: amdgpu fan: 0
Info: Processes: 441 Uptime: 15m Memory: 31.29 GiB used: 1.11 GiB (3.6%) Init: systemd v: 246 Compilers: gcc: 10.2.0
Packages: 1283 pacman: 1278 snap: 5 Shell: Zsh v: 5.8 running in: tty 6 inxi: 3.1.05
I spent some time over the last few nights attempting to reduce the number of errors and warnings I was seeing on boot, from my searching most seemed to be quite innocuous, but I resolved them anyway. At this point, I’m just at a complete loss.
I managed to get to the desktop with the Ubuntu live USB by selecting the ‘Safe Graphics Mode’ option. Adding nomodeset
to my boot options didn’t seem to do anything for my actual install however.
Here’s a repo (Projects · Michael Hudson / linux-logs · GitLab) with some recent logs, including from my nomodeset
boot. Any advice on how to debug further?