Baikal issues and fixes

If you landed here, it means you have the unluckiest southbridges of them all: the despicable Baikal chip. Unfortunately there aren't many fixes for this chip, but you may be able to get a working installation.

NOTE

The community has been working hard to update Baikal systems to a stable 6.18 kernel. It may be released soon.

Arch Linux Mesa packages for Baikal

Thanks to deeWaardt, we now have packages specifically built for Baikal consoles, which means that this repo contains Mesa 25.1 and old libdrm that works on kernel 5.4. GitHub download here.

Things that don't work on Baikal consoles

• Stable kernels are on version 5.4 (newer are in development)
• Higher Mesa than 25.1 will not work due to upgraded libdrm that requires newer kernel
• Wayland as default graphics platform won't work, only X11 does, you can however launch a Wayland session after first executing X11
• Ethernet (LAN) doesn't work
• Internal HDD writing speeds are slow due to UFS encryption, you can however install internally (theoretically? you need a different initramfs).

List by uar

Check out their website's baikal section here

Why is Baikal still unsupported?

Because there are almost no developers willing to put so much effort into the chip.

Aeolia and Belize work almost flawlessly between each others because they are very similar, but Baikal is completely different and adds a lot of work to the entire scene. This means that you are still stuck with older kernels which don't support newer libdrm versions which in turn don't support newer mesa-git versions and so on. It's an endless cycle.

In reality there's not much to say, so if you have any issues, shoot a message on the Discords.