Symptoms: Running Fedora 38 and 39 with kernels 6.7.7 on AMD Ryzen 5 with AMD GPU RX570 (Sapphire Radeon PULSE ITX RX 570 4GD5, 4GB GDDR5) sometimes results in a blank screen (no video signal, monitor going to sleep mode) after the boot. The display manager (sddm, wayland) does not start (or is not visible, there is no video) and it is not possible to login or switch to a virtual console.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQuFrbmcv-0

GDE021A1 is a graphics display with a resolution 172x72 pixels, each pixel is 2 bits deep (4 shades of grey). The display has an internal controller SSD1606 with a framebuffer. The framebuffer size is 172*72*2/8=3096 Bytes. When the display is powered up, the system processor sends initialization sequence that first sets up controller’s internal registers (the controller SSD1606 is fairly generic) and then sends new framebuffer content. The display controller then autonomously pushes the framebuffer contents to the physical screen.

The display controller can be configured to orient the framebuffer almost any way. I configured it into a landscape mode, with the X-axis going right and the Y-axis down, as shown on the photo.

Look what I’ve got by post today from our Chinese comrades at ‘Good Display’ factory: a nice small 2.04-inch electrophoretic display (EPD), or better known as ePaper/eInk display or ’electronic paper’.

[caption id=“attachment_232” align=“alignnone” width=“856”] ePaper EPD display front side view[/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_231” align=“aligncenter” width=“632”] ePaper EPD display back side[/caption]

Electrophoretic displays (EPD) do not require any power to retain  an image. Power is needed only when redrawing the screen. The technology is thus used in electronic paper readers such as Amazon Kindle or the Pebble smartwatch (correction: Pebble uses different display: Memory LCD).