Wednesday, September 6, 2017

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on AMD APU Kabini

In order to have Tumbleweed GUI working on Kabini, one needs to install the kernel-firmware package.

Recently moved my Linux workstation to an old AMD APU platform with Kabini (Athlon 5350). The installation completed successfully, but the console goes blank and X cannot use the radeon driver and fallback to VESA.

After some digging​, found that although the radeon and amdgpu modules are loaded, there are error messages in dmesg saying that some firmwares cant be loaded.

The problem can be easily fixed by installing the kernel firmware:

sudo zypper install kernel-firmware

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yesterday I had the same problem with a recent openSuse Tumbleweed installation. I came to the same conclusion, it is necessary to install the kernel-firmware package (I am surprised that it is not installed by default).

To do this I had to add the parameter "nomodeset" in grub, and then install the package with zypper from console.

Frustrating not to work out of the box