Can't boot into Gamescope session after installing AMDVLK driver

Issues & Assistance
1

Hello!

I’m happily running a CachyOS Handheld Edition on my desktop rig to enjoy a couch gaming experience.
It’s been perfectly stable for 3 months and I cannot be more thankful for CachyOS and all the wonderful work the team has put into this distro.

Yesterday I was benchmarking my rig across different kernel and settings and I wanted to benchmark some of my games with amdvlk (specially unreal engine games as I read some reports that Mesa was underperforming in some very specific situation).

However as I installed amdvlk my system can’t boot anymore because the handheld edition is setup to boot into gamescope who seems to be crashing at boot.
I can’t boot into plasma at all, all I see is a black screen at boot, I’ve tried Ctrl+alt+F1/F2/F3/F4, I can see the tty prompt but my keyboard isn’t responsive and can’t login into tty to rescue my system.

I’m stuck, I need to boot into plasma to uninstall amdvlk and I cannot find any way to do this because the system is always trying to boot gamescope session first.

What would be the best way to solve this?

Rig is 9800x3d with Rx 7900xt

Thank you!

2

You can’t use your keyboard, probably because the system is locked up.

Read this, even the link to kernel parameters systemd - ArchWiki

You need to append systemd.unit=multi-user.target to your bootloader, this is temporary, but it won’t try to load the graphical target and you can get to the tty to uninstall amdvlk

1 Like
3

Thank you!
I followed your instructions and weirdly enough it still tried to boot into gamescope session with the same black screen as before but when I tried Ctrl+alt+F3 my system wasn’t locked up and I did manage to login into tty and uninstalled amdvlk without issues, I’m back and running!

Thank you and have a wonderful day/evening/morning :white_heart: