video driver hell reddit / freebsd ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Bagginzes · 2020-10-01 22:00 TLDR: broke my rc.conf and am trying to boot off an install usb or any other method to fix it. As we're all bored in these covid lockdown days, I decided to build a new machine. I've got four drives in this box, one running a hackintosh on opencore, one running win10, one running arch linux and now a FreeBSD drive as well. I've never tried using FreeBSD so I thought why the heck not? This machine is running an AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT. I read elsewhere that I had to install 13.0 CURRENT and make/install/clean from /usr/ports/graphics/drm-devel-kmod to use a newer graphics driver (I've gone through versions of FreeBSD 11 and 12 trying to get Xorg to work and pulling my hair out). So I've compiled xorg, and the drm-devel-kmod and then I read that there might be a problem with amdgpu on UEFI machines and to add "hw.syscons.disable=1" to my rc.conf. Well now the boot appears to stall almost immediately. However, I do know that the machine is continuing to run. I can blindly login as root and reboot the machine. How can I get to my rc.conf file and remove the hw.syscons line so I can keep trying to get Xorg to run? On Arch Linux I would boot on my install USB and chroot into the main harddrive. I've tried the little I know but I can't even figure out how to mount my internal hard drive in FreeBSD to be able to get at my rc.conf file to fix it. Booting into single user mode doesn't help either. Thanks in advance! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kevans91 · 2020-10-01 23:52 You sure that was rc.conf and not loader.conf? The symptoms (and that it's a tunable) sound more like the latter, and you should be able to drop to the loader prompt and \`set hw.syscons.disable=0\` to override the loader.conf setting, then \`boot-conf\`/\`boot\`. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Bagginzes · 2020-10-02 00:10 Yes! Sorry it’s been forever since I’ve been back in a non systemd enviro. Loader.conf for sure. How do I “drop to the loader prompt”? Is it one of the boot options at the first splash screen? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kevans91 · 2020-10-02 00:13 Yup! Should be option #3 or hitting the escape key ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kevans91 · 2020-10-02 00:19 For your original problem, did you get the prerequisite lines to load amdgpu, et al., into /etc/rc.conf? They're mentioned in the pkg- message (available again here for convenience: [https://www.freshports.org/graphics/drm-devel- kmod](https://www.freshports.org/graphics/drm-devel-kmod)) -- this would've made losing efifb only a minor deal if it properly loaded and attached once the system went multi-user. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Bagginzes · 2020-10-02 03:07 Thanks all. Looks like amdgpu is getting loaded now that I’ve fixed the loader.conf and the rc.conf but I’m getting a backtrace error and caught signal 6 abort? How the heck do I copy my Xorg log to here!? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Bagginzes · 2020-10-05 00:17 Fixed. Wiped drive and installed 13-CURRENT with drm-devel-kmod as packages instead of ports. Worked like a charm.