[oi-dev] OI on AMD Ryzen and ASUS and BIOS

[Gary Mills]

It's looking as if I'm running into two problems with this system, one
in upgrading the BIOS but keeping the OI version the same, and the
other in upgrading OI but keeping the BIOS version the same.

The system has an ASUS PRIME B350M-A motherboard, an AMD Ryzen 3 1200
CPU, and a Radeon HD 7450 video card.  When I upgrade the BIOS from
4207 to 4406, I get a panic and reboot loop.  The OS was OI
hipster-20191229 both before and after the incident.

The second problem occurs when I upgrade OI from hipster-20191229 to
hipster-20200212.  It occurs with any BIOS version ranging from 4014
to 5220.  hipster-20200212 does contain Robert Mustacchi's changes for
illumos bugs 12135, 12136, and 12134.  I no longer get the panic and
reboot loop, but I do get a hang when X11 starts.  The version of
X.Org is the same.  The log file /var/log/Xorg.0.log appears
truncated, ending with:

    [    48.495] (II) VESA: driver for VESA chipsets: vesa
    [    48.526] (++) using VT number 7

The screen never changes to graphics style.  The login box never
appears.  As far as I can tell, X11 never completes.  Appending this
to /etc/system makes no difference:

    set pcie:pcie_disable_lbw = 1

Copying the pcie driver from hipster-20191229 also made no difference.

I can see several possible causes for this problem, but I may have
missed a few.  How can I collect more information to narrow the
field of suspects?


-- 
-Gary Mills-		-refurb-		-Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada-