Bug 77861

Summary: 3.15 fails to boot on Yeeloong 8133 with AMD 780E graphics
Product: Drivers Reporter: Christophe Jarry (christophe.jarry)
Component: Video(Other)Assignee: drivers_video-other
Status: NEW ---    
Severity: high CC: alexdeucher, christian.koenig
Priority: P1    
Hardware: Mips64   
OS: Linux   
Kernel Version: 3.15 Subsystem:
Regression: No Bisected commit-id:

Description Christophe Jarry 2014-06-14 05:21:43 UTC 
I am using a Yeeloong 8133 with Loongson 3A processor (mips64el). GPU is an AMD 780E. I built linux 3.15 with the default .config for this machine: arch/mips/configs/loongson3_defconfig. When I boot with this kernel, my display does not show any information. I suspect something is wrong with the radeon video driver.
Comment 1 Christophe Jarry 2014-06-16 08:39:13 UTC 
The culprit commit is https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=01ac8794a77192236a4b91c33adf4177ac5a21f0 by Alex Deucher: drm/radeon: re-order firmware loading in preparation for dpm rework.
Comment 2 Alex Deucher 2014-06-16 13:02:06 UTC 
Make sure you have the necessary ucode installed and available on your initrd if you are uing one.
Comment 3 Christophe Jarry 2014-06-16 13:58:53 UTC 
Where can I get this ucode? It's obviously not part of the kernel sources, why?
Comment 4 Alex Deucher 2014-06-16 14:09:09 UTC 
Firmware is not allowed in the kernel source tree. It's included in the linux-firmware tree:
http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git
and most distros provide packages for it.
Comment 5 Christophe Jarry 2014-06-16 14:20:23 UTC 
The radeon firmware is clearly non-free. Is there a way to make linux 3.15 boot on my computer without this firmware?
Comment 6 Alex Deucher 2014-06-16 14:58:56 UTC 
We don't support using the driver without the firmware loaded.  It's requried for too much functionality.  Without it, you don't have support for acceleration or interrupts.
Comment 7 Christophe Jarry 2014-06-17 07:45:32 UTC 
In that case, is it possible to have graphics on an AMD/ATI GPU without the radeon driver?
Comment 8 Alex Deucher 2014-06-17 13:31:22 UTC 
You can use vesa or efifb if your platform supports it.