AMD Ryzen 5000 series APUs need kernel 5.11+, when will Mint officially support kernels this new?

[Chrisso]

Mint has been my go-to OS for more than a decade, but I'm forced to abandon Mint until it supports kernel 5.11 because my new laptop sporting a Ryzen 5600H APU requires the newer kernel to properly support the integrated graphics.

I unsuccessfully tried installing Mint 20.1, and the Edge Edition with kernel 5.8, and the beta 20.2. None worked because of only supporting old kernels. For the time being, I jumped to Ubuntu 21.04 which ships with kernel 5.11 and with that OS, all works as expected out of the box.

I'm posting here to find out how long my hiatus from Mint will be. Thanks!!

[spamegg]

It's not a matter of "how long" because it's not up to Mint, which uses Ubuntu's LTS version as base. Ubuntu 20.04 base will use 5.4 and optional 5.8 until 2025. Ubuntu will release another LTS in April 2022 so that might have a newer kernel, who knows.

For now you might be better off with Ubuntu's 21.04 (short-term support, only until Jan 2022) that comes with 5.11: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/hirsute- ... otes/19221 Otherwise you would have to figure out how to install the 5.11 kernel in Mint which can be difficult and breaking.

[Pjotr]

By means of the reliable Canonical Kernel Team PPA, you can install the 5.11.x kernel in your Mint 20.x:
https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.c ... t.html#ID8
(item 8 )

[Chrisso]

Thanks Pjotr!! I previously failed trying to get kernel 5.11 to work when sourced via the 3rd party Mainline Ubuntu Kernel Update Utility.

Since I'd rather not wait a year for offical support, I'll try installing Mint again, but this time using your suggested Canonical 5.11 kernel, since I know it works well in 21.04.

[Chrisso]

I’m following up for posterity, in hopes that it will help others facing the same situation to get Mint running on their new hardware. At the time of this writing, Mint’s latest standard edition uses kernel 5.4 and the Edge edition uses kernel 5.8, while my laptop’s APU needs kernel 5.11 to work properly.

Here’s what I did to get Mint 20.1 running kernel 5.11 on my new laptop (HP Pavilion Gaming 15-ec2021nr) which uses a Ryzen 5600H APU:

• 1. Installed Linux Mint 20.1 Cinnamon Edge edition. This boots, but with gimpy graphics.
  (note, the live USB for Mint 20.1 standard edition and 20.2 beta edition both run kernel 5.4, and on this hardware, those live USBs just hang during boot, so the Edge edition which runs kernel 5.8 is needed as a starting point.)
  
  2. Once Mint Edge edition was installed and updated, I followed Pjotr’s suggested steps from here to get kernel 5.11:
  https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.c ... t.html#ID8
  a.

  Code: Select all

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:canonical-kernel-team

  b.

  Code: Select all

  sudo apt-get update

  c. From the menu, launch Update Manager. In the toolbar of Update Manager: View - Linux kernels
  Install the very latest kernel in the list. (for me the latest kernel was 5.11.0-20)
  
  3. After installing the latest kernel, reboot the laptop and enjoy its butter smooth 1920x1080@144Hz graphics

Notes-
The only problem I’ve noticed while running the unsupported 5.11 kernel in Mint 20.1 is that I can't run VirtualBox. I’ll need to tinker to see if I can get VirtualBox working with the unsupported kernel. Otherwise everything else seems to work great!

I’m hoping that eventually Mint's 20.1 or 20.2 Edge edition will come with a kernel new enough to support my hardware. If not, the above steps will be my work-around for the next year until the version of Mint that’s based on Ubuntu 22.04 gets released. Presumably that version of Ubuntu will ship with a new enough kernel to support Ryzen 5000 series APUs.

Thank you to all for the much appreciated help!! This community is part of why I love Mint!

[Chrisso]

Rockstar!!

It looks like Edge edition just officially began supporting kernel 5.11.0-22.

Yay!!! Thank you so much to the powers that be. You have no idea how much of a relief this is

Not only does the new kernel fix my Ryzen 5600H laptop APU issue, but it also fixes my Ryzen 5800X desktop's 2.5G networking, and temp monitoring for its CPU and NVMe drives. Woo Hoo!

I'd like to close this thread as resolved, but I'm not sure how?

(p.s. I also got VirtualBox working by uninstalling the repo version and downloading a newer version directly from Oracle which supports kernel 5.11 and 5.12)

Cheers!!