Is a reinstall required when switching from Intel to AMD
Hi all,
I'm switching motherboards. No dGPU. Going from an Intel MB to an AMD one. I have my root partition on an nvme and the home one on a 2.5" sata. Do I need to reinstall, or can I just move the drives from the old MB to the new one without a problem? Figured since both Intel and AMD drivers are both baked into the kernel out of the box, wouldn't it just work and I'll only need to remove the Intel stuff? I'm running good ole endeavourOS with KDE Plasma if that makes any difference.
Any insight is much appreciated
Intel and amd are compatible because they are both the same architecture. The only times you would need to reinstall is if the architecture changes; eg, 32-bit to 64-bit or you started using an arm based processor.
You may potentially need to edit your kernel boot parameters in grub or w/e bootloader you're using, in case you're early-loading any CPU microcode. For instance, if you're loading your Intel microcode via GRUB, you may need to run grub-mkconfig from a chroot (or your old system, if it's still accessible), or edit your grub.cfg and check the initrd parameter. But if you're late-loading microcode then you don't need to worry about it (although late-loading is discouraged and will taint the kernel).
Best to check your distro's documentation on how to update the initrd / microcode.
I have not made any special changes to the kernel parameters. Everything is stock. Only thing I did is hide grub menu from etc/default/grub. That's all.
Reinstalling is only needed when the old and new CPU differ in architecture. Since these two don't, you don't have to reinstall, just make sure you install the amd-ucode package :)
As you’ve read from the comments it will work just fine.
On the other hand I’ve never done this major of a hardware change without a reinstall. I’d always be concerned if something is wiggy if it was some ghost in the machine from the previous install.
Now I also work in enterprise level IT so even my home stuff is a fairly automated install process with ansible and the like. Then again a lot of it is also virtual so take this with a grain of salt.
I actually did run into some of those "ghosts". Lol
Nothing major, though. I've been thinking of doing a complete clean install anyway since I haven't done it in a very long time. Like, I want to even nuke my home partition and redo the whole thing.