Bluefin works amazingly well out of the box on the Framework 13. I specifically run the Ryzen 7 7040 variant, and there were a few small tweaks I needed to perform to ensure things behaved as expected out of the box on my day one experience.
I thought it might be prudent to start capturing these details in a community post to ensure they don’t get lost in my personal notes if someone is following behind me and finds these same rough corners.
Screen Flickering on suspend, or docking over USB-C
There’s a display bug, even on the 3.03 firmware with the Framework 13 AMD 7840u. As these boards are still quite new, and AMD is still rolling out patches - there’s a work-around if you notice your desktop drops to a blank white screen, or arguably worse flickers rapidly between the drawn desktop, and a blank white screen (epilepsy trigger warning).
Additional detection can be sourced from the kernel logs. Open up a terminal and check dmesg
output. You should see something similar, in red, in your dmesg logs (barring you haven’t rebooted, and cleared the log. These messages can be fetched via journalctl, but that’s a touch out of scope)
Example dmesg output from the forum post
[Fri Oct 20 11:33:39 2023] [drm:mes_v11_0_submit_pkt_and_poll_completion.constprop.0 [amdgpu]] *ERROR* MES failed to response msg=14
[Fri Oct 20 11:33:39 2023] [drm:amdgpu_mes_reg_write_reg_wait [amdgpu]] *ERROR* failed to reg_write_reg_wait
[Fri Oct 20 11:33:39 2023] [drm:mes_v11_0_submit_pkt_and_poll_completion.constprop.0 [amdgpu]] *ERROR* MES failed to response msg=14
[Fri Oct 20 11:33:39 2023] [drm:amdgpu_mes_reg_write_reg_wait [amdgpu]] *ERROR* failed to reg_write_reg_wait
The work-around pending an upstream fix is to append some kargs to your kernel boot string, which disables the module causing the issue:
sudo rpm-ostree kargs --append="amdgpu.sg_display=0"
Then reboot. You should be able to verify if the fix has worked by closing the lid to the laptop, allowing it to enter a hibernation state and then re-opening the laptop.
Source: framework discourse
What does the karg do?
By default the AMDGPU driver will attempt to use S/G display support for capable APUs but if the amdgpu. sg_display=0 option is set it will disable the feature.
This is the only work-around or “quick fix” I’ve needed since performing a fresh install yesterday when I first received the laptop. If you’ve found anything that would help others onboard with a framework laptop - lets compile this thread and keep it updated as these “fixes” age out, and update with anything new.
Where’s my framework friends at?