Tuesday 5 June 2018

Fedora 27 - 28 upgrade and freezing machine

I'm not dead.

You might have thought so with the infrequent nature of my posting here, but take that as a positive reflection on the state of Fedora as a Linux distro.

My latest problem related to an upgrade of Fedora 27 to  Fedora 28. After conducting the upgrade via the dnf upgrade plugin process, when I came to reboot my machine would get to the graphical login screen then freeze.

Keyboard, mouse, everything, frozen.

If I edit the grub boot options to start in run level 3 it would boot up and I could login quite happily, which I was doing with a series of reconfiguration and reboot cycles as I tried disabling services, reinstalling drivers and so on.

One positive, I have now learned about
journalctl -b -1
and was using it quite a bit to see output from boot attempts.

My initial thoughts were that this was a problem with my graphics card, a Radeon RX460. I have had issues in the past getting it working.

So I tried changing BIOS settings to use integrated graphics instead of this PCI-e card, no luck there.

Turns out my Gigabyte z170x motherboard has an Intel feature called ThunderBolt.
In my fiddling with BIOS trying to turn off as many features as possible, this was the one that was causing my issues. After disabling Intel ThunderBolt, I can once again use my PC.

I've no idea if it's the specific combination of hardware (Gigabyte Z170X motherboard with Radeon RX460 graphics, connected via DisplayPort to a large monitor) or simply Fedora dooesn't currently like ThunderBoth, but for now at least, ThunderBolt is staying off on my system!

Follow up:
Looks like Fedora are just adding ThunderBolt support with Fedora 28.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/ThunderboltEnablement

I guess the problems I'm seeing are just because of that, presumably the chippery had always been on, but only now is my graphical system trying to make use of it.