The Apseed ast2500 might be very old hardware but it s the graphic card of my 2 year old Intel motherboard with recent Xeon cpus and is still being produced. The driver is now maintained only for Windows but it had a dual Linux and Freebsd ports. I m meaning that either you have modeseting or you have to use nomodeset in order to use a window environment with the `ast_drv.so` Xorg blob (the kernel driver is exclusive of the Xorg driver and it doesn t support Xorg). So the Xorg driver binary is a old full userspace driver that nevertheless allow playing drm videos that require support from the graphics card for the drm decoding. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: upgrade to Fedora 40 Actual Results: whether modeset is enabled or disabled, screen become black and still stay black even when returning to console (hard reboot required). This is the same thing that happens with Xorg when the driver isn t installed even if you don t use the kernel module compiled from proprietary blobs. Expected Results: Be able to use Xorg until compatibility solution is found in order to be able to use Graphical desktop or get the driver reverse engineered (should be difficult as it supports playing drm videos that require graphic card support).
Created attachment 2003696 [details] Graphical environment drivers
It won t get fixed upstream https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=478384#c6 including by the vendor who now only supports console mode.
This is more of a kernel problem than us, reassigning to the kernel.
Although it doesn t concerns Fedora, there s the issue of Freebsd which only has the Xorg driver. Please also notice the same problem occurs with generic kernel drivers. Though they have the problem of reducing blanking on Analog output and there an option to force reduce blanking but not to force enable it. The Windows drivers support decoding drm videos.
Note that the drm/ast driver in the Linux kernel is not developed or maintained by Aspeed, but instead by a member of the Linux kernel community. It should definitely be possible to engage with them to help resolve this. To report such issues, you should to send an email to dri-devel.org.