@hrw I have the same motherboard. For an Intel Arc A380 and AMD WX3200 (Polaris), I use @chimera (musl based and with BSD userland base) as it incorporates the PCIe patches OOTB. The AMD card has had intermittent bugs depending upon Mesa and kernel version (sometimes was stable but would also crash rarely, and haven’t used it since December or January on a regular basis), and now I mostly use the Arc card. The Arc requires PCI resizable bar to be turned on in the UEFI firmware platform settings. It also does not POST even with EDK2 and the X86 oprom emulator, so no boot graphics.

I also use an Nvidia RTX 3060, with @ultramarine and @UniversalBlue Bluefin GDX LTS beta, as they both incorporate the Nvidia binary drivers by default. This card doesn’t require kernel PCIe bug patching.

With #freebsd, there are NO supported GPU drivers on aarch64, but KDE runs on X11 on the scfb (UEFI GOP framebuffer) so having a card that POSTs and provides a UEFI framebuffer is important. This requires X86 oprom emulation unless you have an AMD card new enough (eg. Navi 2x) to have aarch64 UEFI driver in the oprom, or you load the AMD UEFI driver from the UEFI shell. (AMD has official downloads of their UEFI GOP drivers.)

With #openbsd, X11 will work on the UEFI framebuffer as well. They do build AMD GPU driver into their arm64 kernel, but it is unstable on the Ampere Altra so I disable it.

#unix desktop IS possible on #arm64 in 2025, but it is death by 1000 cuts and requires constant compromises and workarounds. And I’m just doing this as a hobby… 🫠

#amperealtra #amperecomputing