Latest kernel firmware for Radeon causes Linux to crash if an external monitor is plugged in

Which Linux distro are you using?
openSUSE Tumbleweed
Which release version?
20240901

Which kernel are you using?
6.10.7-1.1
Which BIOS version are you using?
3.03
Which Framework Laptop 16 model are you using?
AMD Ryzen™ 7040 Series

Also have a thread about this in the openSUSE Forums here.

Upon updating from 20240829, my monitor wasn’t receiving anything from the DisplayPort cable plugged in to the DisplayPort adapter in my laptop. A rollback confirmed that snapshot 20240901 was the issue. Eventually, I was able to wrangle the monitor into working whenever I plug it in after booting, but having it plugged in on boot still causes a crash.

Unfortunately, I have no idea whether it’s an actual kernel issue or an issue with the freshly updated firmware, as both were packaged in my update. See post below

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Thanks to the power of rollbacks and being able to boot into the previous kernel, I was able to confirm it was the kernel firmware that was the problem. It is a known issue, but apparently only on the RX 6800 XT:

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Glad to see it was a Linux kernel issue.

Do you have the AMD card in the expansion bay or just the onboard one? Curious if it is an issue with dedicated AMD graphics or all AMD.

Rollbacks for the win!

My tumbleweed install is broken since a couple days, too. But seemingly another error, as removing the dock with the external monitors doesn’t help. No dGPU, the error is somewhat in the middle of the boot process, failing to populate /dev, failing to start polkit demon, failing to reach GUI. I’ll try and gather more information later today.
[edit]
Nope, not the reason for my problem. I’ve been running kernel 6.10.5-1-default successfully, when it stopped working after booting the Ubuntu 22.04 system, doing some updates there and switching back to openSUSE. The boot went wrong a couple seconds in with systemd-tmpfiles-setup-dev-early.service: Main process exited, code=dumped, status=11/SEGV
It won’t boot correctly since, even in recovery mode. Lots of errors, perhaps some UUID confusion, I don’t know how to recover yet.
[/edit]

Just the onboard one. I’m surprised that there haven’t been any complaints from Arch users.

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Looks like this problem does also affect the current installation media. Trying to troubleshoot my tumbleweed install, I tried running the installer (version 2024-09-03) and it would only display a black screen instead of the menu. Disconnecting my dock and thus the monitors made it work.

This issue was resolved for me when I updated to the 2024-09-05 snapshot, which contained new kernel firmware that fixed the issue. I had the symptom briefly flare up today, but then my external monitor got a signal and the boot continued. The problem seems to be that the kernel stops booting if an external monitor is detected and refuses to continue booting until it receives a proper signal, judging by a brief flareup where the kernel boot process hitched until my monitor started mirroring my laptop screen.