Xfce Forum

s140680

Member

From: Saint-Petersburg (Russia)

Registered: 2020-10-11

Posts: 4

AMD APU (AMD A9-9425 + RADEON R5 and other)

I needed a notebook for travel, including abroad.
The software requirements were as follows:
- lack of Microsoft products;
- 100% licensed purity;
- ascetic UI (like WinXP without any effects);
- unconditional stability in work.

In March 2020, I bought an ASUS VivoBook.
Main characteristics:
CPU: AMD A9-9425
VGA: AMD Radeon R5
OS: Endless

I always knew AMD was a big problem in Linux. But!
ASUSTeK is a serious company that doesn't need product recall programs and endless customer requests for warranty, so I had no doubts about the quality of the product.

Indeed, everything worked without additional effort.
I really didn't like the Endless OS concept. But that doesn't matter, as I originally planned to use Debian GNU / Linux and XFCE.

The EOS partition has been mercilessly cut. It's good that I was smart enough not to kill him right away.

Debian 10 was installed.

And the nightmare began!
Everything stopped working. Notebook hangs, software is buggy. Notebook has gone crazy.
Reading the Internet, dancing with a tambourine and invoking Zarathustra, as well as using various kernels and firmware, did not change the situation.

Mission failed? Don't wait! )

The uniqueness of linux/kernel based distributions is that the kernel and OS are in most cases independent of each other.

Based on this understanding, I took from EOS: kernel, modules, initramfs and firmware. And made debian boot with this.

Everything worked! ALL! )

I understand what and where to look, but I am not a programmer (kernel hacker).

Are there people here with whom you could discuss technical details?
We can do a good deed for all owners of AMD products.

P.S.

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep AMD
vendor_id       : AuthenticAMD
model name      : AMD A9-9425 RADEON R5, 5 COMPUTE CORES 2C+3G
vendor_id       : AuthenticAMD
model name      : AMD A9-9425 RADEON R5, 5 COMPUTE CORES 2C+3G

$ cat /proc/version
Linux version 4.16.0-4-generic (abuild@obs-slave1) (gcc version 6.3.0 20170516 (Debian 6.3.0-18+deb9u1endless1bem1)) #5+dev781.9d6f9aabeos3.4.nexthw1-Endless SMP Tue Jun 12 03:50:15

$ cat /etc/debian_version
10.6

Signy

Member

Registered: 2020-10-20

Posts: 52

Re: AMD APU (AMD A9-9425 + RADEON R5 and other)

I am not sure whether I understood you correctly, but if you are running the Debian (with kernel Linux version 4.16.0-4-generic) on rather new AMD processor and graphics, it is recipe for troubles.
I was in similar situation 1 year ago with AMD Ryzen 5 2400G and its internal graphics - Xubuntu 18 with 4.x kernel was pretty bad combination. The graphics froze me once in a while (even 4.20). Kernel version 5.X helped - it was not perfect, but it worked.
I knew that LTS distribution with older kernel is a bad idea, but I am used to Xubuntu and wanted to stick with it.
So I updated kernel (via UKUU kernel update utility) and used MESA recommended for my graphics card (Padoka PPA ppa:paulo-miguel-dias/mesa) and it worked.

Endless OSS 3.8 uses Linux kernel 5.4 - that is way newer than 4.16.