I have an AMD Radeon 5700-XT with a fresh and complete install of slackware current (5.4.10)

- Startx produces a black screen and a frozen computer (can't even ctl-alt-f* to get a terminal)

- LSPCI lists the card by name.

- DMESG does not report errors, and | grep AMD shows the amdgpu driver was loaded.

I tried blacklisting radeon as per the Arch wiki.

I tried both the generic and the huge kernel.

Searches have been fruitless; does anyone have a suggestion?

Pastebin Xorg.0.log?

Dare I suggest slackware64-current ? It may be that you need a 64-bit X-window server. On the other hand, it may be that you have a working system and are not waiting long enough after "startx" for your desktop to boot.

What DE are you trying to use? Have you tried different DEs?

I don't see anything funny in there. The driver is loaded, the card is identified among the supported devices and there are no warnings or errors.

I'm on current and startx is definitely resulting in an unresponsive system.


It's a stock install so I tried xfce and fluxbox, and following your suggestion I tried KDE but also dead.

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Is this a new PC, never had any OS installed before? If not, what did it work on OK last, and with which kernel, X server and amdgpu versions? IOW, has this happened with any other OS?

Same problem booting live Fedora, Knoppix, Manjaro or Tumbleweed or ????

I appreciate your thoroughness.

There is on M2 drive with Windows 10 on it, which I run for Adobe CS. The GPU performs as expected. The other M2 has this new install of Slackware.

The motherboard is Asrock X99 with Intel i7. I previously had an Nvidia Quadro card installed, which worked in W10 and in a previous install of Slackware 14.2 (followed by -current) on the same device. I got the AMD GPU after reading years of rave reviews of AMD's Linux driver support.

Which xorg video driver that you used? modesetting or amdgpu?

To whom is your question directed?

Still no logs (Xorg.0.log) that one can check and no answer if it works with other linux live distributions so i guess we are all supposed to participate in an guessing game.

Do your CPU have an iGPU and if so does it work if you use the iGPU?

Saying that "you (OP) didn't see anything funny" in the log files and thus not uploading them has everyone in a guessing game.

There could even be X11 (not to mention Slackware) developers on LQ.. but they're probably to busy working to respond to a poster who fails to upload logs, assuming your (OP) understanding of the problem is identical to their own.

In regards to "current", as another member pointed out..

Slackware -current is a 32 bit operating system

Slackware64 -current is a 64 bit operating system

As Slackware does release both, specification is needed.

Sorry for the confusion, I meant to ask phalange.

I'm using amdgpu

I tested CentOS 8, Solus, Manjaro, and Fedora. All crashed when starting X except Fedora, which seemed to be running in an anemic safemode although I didn't spend time examining it.

Either a) the 5700-XT is not ready for prime-time under Linux or b) there's something about my GPU-MB-CPU combo that's a no-go. In either event, the fact that these distros all bump on it doesn't sound like an botched config file or missing module. With a reasonable chance that a solution may not be available, I'm just going to try a different GPU. I don't have time to do more.

If anyone comes across this thread and is successfully running a 5700-XT, I'd be interested to know what worked.

In the meantime, thanks to those who responded.

You haven't mentioned any versions of the distros you tried. If you'd really like to know whether the 5700-XT is "ready", you probably should try openSUSE Tumbleweed, Fedora Rawhide, Mageia 8 or any other cutting edge or rolling or devel release that isn't lackadaisical about incorporating new hardware support.

Well, CentOS as I said is 8 and the others I downloaded the current versions. Manjaro is close enough to bleeding edge to settle it in my mind, being that the 5700-XT came out in July. I want to run Slackware regardless, so this 'test' illustrates to me that it's probably not just a trivial fix to get it working. And the AMD-PRO drivers are not available for Slackware, at least that I can see.