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I want to move from Gentoo to Parabola but I'm unsure about my hardware's compatiblity

0x22 - about 2 years ago -

I have a rather new laptop and what I'm planning to do is install Parabola on it, use my integrated GPU (Ryzen 7 5800H) on it and pass the nvidia GPU (RTX 3050 Mobile) to a KVM and do GPU intensive tasks in the VM.
Will my hardware (mainly talking about the Ryzen 7 5800H with the iGPU) work?


Replies (4)

RE: I want to move from Gentoo to Parabola but I'm unsure about my hardware's compatiblity - nona - about 2 years ago -

I would check h-node.org, and wait to see if other users have similar hardware. If your kernel cannot use the hardware, it cannot be passed to a virtual machine either.

RE: I want to move from Gentoo to Parabola but I'm unsure about my hardware's compatiblity - GNUtoo - about 2 years ago -

Hi,

I'm unsure about both GPUs, though:
  • For the Ryzen GPU, the amdgpu driver won't work. So you will either end up with something like efifb or you will need to add support for it in linux-libre. It's probably very few lines of code to add but they need to be tested. Reference: https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Hardware/research/gpu/radeon .
  • For the Nvidia GPU as far as I understand from https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/FeatureMatrix.html , 3D acceleration works on all GPUs but the latest generation (they're probably working on it). However without the nonfree firmwares video decoding acceleration won't work on most cards but very old ones, and you will also typically not get full performance on your GPU because without the power management nonfree firmware it can't reconfigure the GPU for full performance.

On some computers it's possible to export PCI devices in VMs though, so you'll need a driver inside the VM instead of in the host. virt-manager can do that.
In the case of AMD, in addition to hardware support, you also need the boot software like the BIOS, UEFI, Coreboot etc to support exporting PCI devices inside VM for that to work.

What is most common (and probably mentioned by nona) is to enable the VM to use a GPU renderer (this is way safer and it doesn't need special hardware and software support for exporting PCI devices in the VM).

RE: I want to move from Gentoo to Parabola but I'm unsure about my hardware's compatiblity - bill-auger - almost 2 years ago -

ryzen computers have been difficult - i dont know which ones though, or if that is true for all of them - maybe some are fine

the best answer to that general question "will it work?", for any software, is simply "try it and see"

people should not be afraid to erase the computer and re-install a new OS - once you do it a few times, it is actually very easy - i cuold erase my entire computer and re-install parabola in less than 10 minutes

but a better way is to erase everything once, then setup multiple partitions - you could install a different OS on each partition, you could also reserve one partition for /home (personal data and desktop configs) - once that is done you can erase only one partition and install a new OS at any time, without affecting the others - that allows you to experiment as much as you want to, with no fear; because you could always keep at least one working OS in tact

in the case of newer computers such as ryzens, that is the only way people will know if it can run parabola - someone must try it, and if it works, to post an experience report for others to find

theova has setup a wiki category for that purpose https://wiki.parabola.nu/Category:Experience_Report
and explained how to add new examples https://labs.parabola.nu/boards/24/topics/50

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