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Topic: Can't boot live disk on Ryzen 3400G (Read 1718 times) previous topic - next topic
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Can't boot live disk on Ryzen 3400G

Hey-hey people, I've been trying to install Artix on a new machine and haven't been able to boot into a live environment, OpenRC consistently hangs on acpid waiting for an event after the artix live script starts, the output always ending like this:

Code: [Select]
 * Starting acpid ... [ ok ]
 * Starting artix live script ...
acpid: starting up with netlink and the input layer
acpid: 1 rule loaded
acpid: waiting for events: event logging is off

Here are the machine's specs:

MB: MSI X570A-Pro
BIOS Ver: E7C37AMS.H60 (Built 2019-11-06)
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3400G
Memory: 16 GiB DDR4
GPU: (Using onboard until it comes in the mail)

Any idea what could be wrong? It seems like an incompatibility between the hardware and Linux 5 but I'm already running the latest base image (artix-base-openrc-20190826-x86_64.iso, written with dd) and have flashed to the latest available BIOS. I've heard there were problems with Linux kernels not booting on Ryzen 3000 series systems but it seemed as if that was already fixed.

This is really frustrating as so far every Linux 5+ distro I've tried has some sort of catastrophic hang right when the boot process is seemingly about to finish. The only success I've had has been with Gentoo (still using kernel 4.19) which has worked reliably every time but I'm really loathe to have to go back to recompiling swathes of packages every time I update and would rather try an arch-based distro with the option of compiled packages from AUR.

Frustratingly, I had no such problems installing Manjaro on my current laptop using the exact same live disk I tried on the main computer and I tried out Artix hoping that I could blame it on systemd which I would rather not be subject to anyway, but that doesn't appear to be the culprit.

Re: Can't boot live disk on Ryzen 3400G

Reply #2 –
I've just tried artix-base-openrc-20191231-x86_64.iso and actually got worse results, this time it can't even mount the boot fs. Though my mostly uneducated guess would be from this line missing the actual string ARTIX_201912 to match the drive label:

Code: [Select]
:: Mounting '/dev/disk/by-label' to '/run/artix/bootmnt'

From there it times out and dumps me into the rootfs prompt, which then proceeds to not even take any input, spitting this out as soon as I hit a key:

Code: [Select]
[  505.820110] xhci_hcd 0000:2a:00.1: xHCI host controller not responding,  assume dead
[  505.820110] xhci_hcd 0000:2a:00.1: HC died; cleaning up

I'm going to try some of the other testing and stable OpenRC options though I'd prefer to use i3. I'll also try everything again when my GPU comes in later today.

Re: Can't boot live disk on Ryzen 3400G

Reply #3 –
system/linux-lts 4.19.88-1 (64.7 MiB 69.0 MiB)
    The LTS Linux kernel and modules
The LTS kernel is a 4 series. If you installed on another machine, then replaced the kernel with the LTS one, perhaps it would work to copy the resulting partition onto the problem machine. You'd need to edit /etc/fstab, set up the boot loader (or just run update-grub or whatever you use from another Linux partition that already boots)  and remake the initrd chrooting from another partition or live iso, it doesn't have to be Artix. It's not that difficult to copy a partition like that though. There are tools to make custom isos with different packages, I'm not sure which approach would be easier. Of course it would be easier if you found an existing iso that worked.
Some Debian iso's had a choice of kernel, I suppose this is why.

Re: Can't boot live disk on Ryzen 3400G

Reply #4 –
Quote from: Stomy – on
I've just tried artix-base-openrc-20191231-x86_64.iso and actually got worse results, this time it can't even mount the boot fs. Though my mostly uneducated guess would be from this line missing the actual string ARTIX_201912 to match the drive label:
Code: [Select]
:: Mounting '/dev/disk/by-label' to '/run/artix/bootmnt'
That ISO image boots fine on my side. What did you use to write it on your USB stick? The recommended way is dd(1).

Re: Can't boot live disk on Ryzen 3400G

Reply #5 –
I finally managed to get Manjaro to work but the same fixes should work for Artix so I'll post what I did. I don't know strictly which thing made the final difference but I'm tempted to think it was either turning iommu off or rolling back the bios version:

  • Put 'amd_iommu=off' in the kernel parameters (needed for live-disk, but I've put in my default grub on the final install as well, never checked if it worked without it)
  • Set bios to only boot in UEFI mode
  • In Windows Boot Options changed CSM->UEFI, Secure Boot was already disabled out of the box
  • Disabled onboard graphics in the Bios settings
  • Unplugged an extra hard drive that was having trouble mounting as swap sometimes on a gentoo install (I couldn't get X to work so I came back to Arch-based attempts)
  • Flashed to second-most-recent MSI Bios (Version H50 rather than H60)

If anyone else has trouble with a similar AMD setup, this might be of some help.

Also, for reference, the dedicated GPU I ended up using is the MSI Mech AMD Radeon RX 5700.

Quote from: nous – on
That ISO image boots fine on my side. What did you use to write it on your USB stick? The recommended way is dd(1).
I was doing all the writes using dd from the beginning, I mentioned it in the original post about halfway.

Re: Can't boot live disk on Ryzen 3400G

Reply #6 –
You were right, that ISO wasn't actually booting right, it was created in a not correctly setup environment...