I recently moved my FW13 to a AMD mother board and repurposed my old i5-1340 motherboard to replace my aging desktop. I am running Fedora 40 Kinoite on both.
To run all 8 monitors on my desktop, I used the iGPU for 4 monitors and a thunderbolt eGPU for 4 monitors. That works mostly, but has some annoying problems.
I just ran across a m.2 to PCIe x16 adapter and decided to try it out. It works much better for the external GPU than thunderbolt, but the FW13 completely disables the iGPU with it attached. I have not found anything in the EFI settings that allow me to always enable the iGPU.
So my question is: Is there another way to force the iGPU to always be enabled even?
Technically, when you have both an iGPU and a dGPU, your computer has to choose the most appropriate one. It might not be worth it to have the dGPU turned on all the time as most tasks usually aren’t that GPU intensive so the iGPU can hash it out and save power compared to the dPGU. Framework has a pretty flaky implementation on windows of this switch, its much better handled in linux. In windows, it switched and you notice a ~2s screen freeze when it does, so that’s pretty bad, but in linux that’s more dynamic thanks to better power controls and hardware access.
However, I believe that the iGPU is disabled at boot if any other internal card is present via PCIE because in that case its evident your use case is to use it as a desktop machine, and switching between all these GPUs start becoming a real problem.
Make sure your software/drivers/kernel/BIOS is all up to date, flash the BIOS manually if you need to (framework have been very late on actually shipping the BIOS they have to fwupd!!!).
If there is no related BIOS option, I can’t help you more than that. I think that at the hardware level it’s impossible because too complicated.
I think you misunderstand my use case. I don’t want to switch between the GPU. I want to run them both at the same time, with 4 monitors on each of them, for a total of 8 monitors.
I am currently running a Thunderbolt 3 eGPU in this manner. It would just be nicer not to have to deal with Thunderbolt.
Yeah, using them both at the same time requires the iGPU to be enabled. In this case the iGPU is disabled at boot and inaccessible and impossible to use after booting because of your other GPU and the way its plugged in.
So it cannot be used side to side with the GPU you plugged in! Or at least that’s how I think this works, don’t hesitate to tell me if I’m wrong.
Using both the outputs on the egpu and the igpu definitely works on the 13, and you do get to use all the output controllers so with an amd framework 13 and a pre 7000 series high end amd gpu you get 4 displays from the igpu and 6 from the dgpu.
You could theoretically also have multiple dgpus for even more XD.
Using both an eGPU and the iGPU definitely works when using a Thunderbolt eGPU.
I am trying to connect the eGPU to the m.2 slot to put it directly on the PCIe bus. When I do that the BIOS turns off the iGPU automatically. I am trying to force the BIOS to enable it.
When I attach the eGPU to the m.2 slot there is no indication in Fedora that the iGPU even exists. It does not show up in any device lists or anyplace else. If it was the OS shutting it off I would think it would still show up, it would just be disabled.
I have given up on trying to get this to work. I have gone back to using Thunderbolt because I finally got it so that I can boot with the Thunderbolt eGPU attached.