bug#54945: installer should have a no-graphics boot option

[pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)]

On Fri, Apr 15, 2022 at 02:17:49AM +0200, raingloom wrote:
> Disclaimer: the last time I used an ISO for installing Guix was before
> there was a graphical installer, so I'm not sure what it's expected to
> look like now.
> 
> Anyways, I tried booting the latest release on a netbook, it failed
> around/after KMS. Kernel seemed to lock up. No panic, no usable visible
> log, not responding to Ctrl-Alt-Del, had to reboot with Sysrq-Alt-b.
> I added nomodeset to the kernel command line in GRUB and managed to
> boot it that way, although that still didn't immediately result in a
> usable terminal, vtty1 only had a non-blinking cursor if I recall
> correctly. Had to switch to vtty2 or above to do anything useful.
> 
> So, most users can't be expected to know about nomodeset, so there
> should be a clearly labeled "safe graphics" mode, just like how some
> other distros do it.


I assume that the driver will also cause troubles post-install?  Users
will not be happy users anyway with such a machine.

If you boot with nomodeset, graphics should come up with
uvesafb-shepherd-service from gnu/system/install.scm.  (They did for
my old laptop with latest guix three months ago.)  You imply that
graphics never appear and the screen stays black?  Or does it just
take a long time?

I’ve previously had such issues with AMD Radeon GPUs, so we added it
to the blacklist in gnu/system/install.scm:

    ;; XXX: The AMD Radeon driver is reportedly broken, which makes kmscon
    ;; non-functional:
    ;; <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2019-03/msg00441.html>.
    ;; Thus, blacklist it.
    (kernel-arguments '("quiet" "modprobe.blacklist=radeon"))

Regards,
Florian