Re: [Tails-testers] Unusable on devices with AMD Vega Mobile…

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Autore: intrigeri
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To: Rangan Das, tails-testers\@boum.org
Oggetto: Re: [Tails-testers] Unusable on devices with AMD Vega Mobile GPUs
Hi,

Rangan Das:
> Hi, the new releases that you have linked in the message works.
> But they do not work straightaway. I have also tried the new
> released build. I have added the logs from Whisperback in the mail.
> Here are some of the issues I faced with the builds.


Thanks a lot for trying all these combinations, it's super helpful!

> The boot process is stuck with message "pci 0000:00:00.2: AMD-Vi:
> Unable to write to IOMMU perf counter."


This seems to be a common problem with AMD IOMMU. Please retry with
4.0~rc1, installed with Etcher, adding (once at a time) these boot
options:

iommu=soft

iommu=off

amd_iommu=off

Thanks in advance!

If this does not work: switching to GRUB (which we'll do in 2020) will
fix Tails boot on this machine, but only in legacy BIOS mode. I don't
think we can do much about this problem until then :/

Note that Rufus is not a supported installation method. We cannot
guarantee that the resulting Tails behaves as intended.

> Please note, while working with the Beta versions, I discovered some reliability issues with certain Sandisk flash drives. This is not exclusive to Tails, but also exists with Ubuntu and Linux Lite. The following flash drives are extremely unreliable or are prone to failure. Here are some of my observations:


> # https://www.sandisk.com/home/usb-flash/ultra-fit - overheats easily, fails to boot unless drive is cooled down.
> # https://www.sandisk.com/home/usb-flash/ultra-usb - fails completely after prolonged writes.
> # https://www.sandisk.com/home/mobile-device-storage/ultra-dual-drive-usb-type-c - overheats after a few minutes. Persistence storage read/write performance drops significantly.
> # https://www.sandisk.com/home/usb-flash/cruzer-force - slow, but most reliable of the lot.


> It would be nice if you could suggest flash drives that are good for prolonged usage of Tails.


I'm not sure we have good data in this respect. sajolida, maybe?

Cheers,
--
intrigeri