Are there any software issues I may/should deal with when doing a full system upgrade? I’m going from AM4 to AM5, so new CPU, motherboard and RAM.
It should be pretty straightforward under Linux, right? Just swap my drives over and boot up? I’ve only ever done single upgrades at a time, never a full generation.
Pretty much… as long as you didn’t do any custom kernel stuff or driver blacklisting or any other underhood voodoo with the boot system.
I moved my SSD from my old 8th gen Intel laptop to my brand new Zen 4 Framework 16. It was absolutely uneventful. Almost disappointing 😅
If you have a default kernel it should be fine (If you don’t know and you haven’t installed nvidia drivers you do). I’ve even moved around between amd and intel without issues.
I recently did an Intel to AMD switch and still using the same installation with same SSD. I just needed to reconfigure my network name because motherboard is changed though.
I swapped the boot drive from a 1st gen i7 machine to a threadripper machine and it worked without any issues. I was using the default kernel on Linux Mint.
If you have any temperature monitoring or custom fan control stuff, you will need to reconfigure it though.
No, unless you did stuff that would lead to you not asking this question.
Generic distro kernel? You shouldn’t have any problems.
Hand-compiled kernel cooked up with
-march=native? You’re sticking with AMD, so there should still be no issues unless some instruction got dropped between the old CPU and the new, which almost never happens. You might have to add a kernel module or two for things built into your mobo, nothing serious.(Hell, I had a Windows 2000 install on a multi-boot system survive an upgrade like that, once upon a time. Just booted perfectly happily on the new hardware.)
Modern windows actually handles hardware upgrades pretty well. Just make sure you manually install the chipset drivers so it can read your boot drive and windows update will figure out the rest after a reboot or two.
I did a similar upgrade last year. I don’t recall any problems under Debian. I now have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, which my old mobo did not support.
Of course, you should be sure to do a full backup.
I don’t have anything important to back up, I would just like to avoid reinstalling everything, particularly my Steam library.
If I can save myself the trouble, that’s all I want. I know Windows doesn’t like that kind of upgrades and you end up with a ton of useless drivers sitting around for nothing, but I haven’t been on Windows in a couple years.
Windows is better these days (or at least last time I did a drive swap on win 10)
I have taken bare metal linux/BSD and gone vm and back with disk passthrough without issue (Xeon => vm on Xeon => i5 13xxx => vm on i5)
I’ve pulled Linux boot drives out of one machine to stick them in a very different machine (e.g. from a 6th gen Intel i7 with an AMD GPU to an AMD 5950X with an NVIDIA GPU) and they almost always just work or require only minor tweaks. Chances are it will be fine.
I compile my kernel with specific cpu optimizations, so i’ll just have to recompile a new image. Outside of that, everything is drop-in
Exciting! Enjoy the upgrade!
Moving from a 5600X to a 7900X3D, pretty big upgrade.
I did the same thing last week on Fedora 40 with the latest kernel at the time. Everything went fine.
Had to fiddle with bios settings to get the performance out of the cpu/memory
Also worth noting there’s a delay in boot with no feedback on screen initially where the memory is tested/trained. That blank screen made me panic a bit
