Re: Hang at boot on Dell Inspiron 15

[Alyssa Ross <hi@alyssa.is>]

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Demi Marie Obenour <demiobenour@gmail.com> writes:

> I built a Spectrum OS image using
> https://github.com/DemiMarie/spectrum/tree/499323fa448406ec728b1f29a4bca6dc54f5df32.
> This is almost the same as Spectrum git main, and I am almost
> certain that the differences (visible on GitHub) are not related to
> this problem.  Therefore, I'm reporting this as if it were a bug in
> Spectrum itself.
>
> The bug is pretty simple: on a Dell Inspiron 15, booting freezes
> forever.  The last message from the kernel before it stops is:
>
> amdgpu 0000:03:00.0: [drm] fb0: amdgpudrmfb frame buffer device

This is most likely the known issue where we hardcode an assumption that
we should wait for /dev/dri/card0, but on some hardware there's only
/dev/dri/card1, at least by the time we get that far in boot.  Perhaps
you can try replacing card0 with card1 in the sources to confirm.

(This is a very serious issue, of course, but there's apparently an easy
fix for it with COSMIC, and I don't know of one with Weston, so it's
been waiting for the switchover.)

> This machine has an AMD Ryzen 7000 series CPU with integrated
> graphics and a 512GB NVMe drive.  The installation ISO was built by
>
> $ nix build --log-format bar-with-logs --file release/combined --out-link "path to Caddy web root"
>
> with a custom config.nix that I can also share if
> needed.  It just specifies the update URL and signing
> key, though.  The actual install ISO I built can be found at
> <https://test-spectrum-updater.devbydemi.com/demi/spectrum-updates/spectrum-installer.iso>
> (no authentication needed).  This was built on (and is hosted by)
> a test server I don't particularly trust, so don't mount or boot it
> on a machine you care about outside of a VM with no GPU acceleration
> or other sandbox holes.
>
> To even install Spectrum, I had to kexec from the existing NixOS
> install because the firmware wouldn't boot the image off of the
> USB stick.  I presume this is a firmware bug, which would not at all
> surprise me.

Does the live image boot?

> I'm not sure how to go about diagnosing this.  The hang happens after
> s6 gets started, but the boot is so fast that it is hard to tell if
> it has switched from the initramfs to the rootfs yet.  In any case,
> it seems to happen before Weston gets a chance to produce any output
> on screen.  Suggestions welcome!

If it's not the card0/card1 thing, some other debugging tips:

• Did this ever work?  If so, first thing to try should usually be
  bisection.
• You should be able to switch VT in the usual way (Ctrl-Alt-F2).  getty
  is running on tty2, tty3, and tty4.
• You should be able to get a serial getty if you include an appropriate
  console parameter on the kernel command line, which can be edited in
  GRUB.

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