trouble with VESA xserver (was Re: Trouble installing Debian on Atom D410)

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Sep 09, 2010 at 08:43:05PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> As I understand it, the VESA driver knows nothing about direct mode
> setting.  It only knows how to ask the BIOS to set modes supported by
> the BIOS.

VESA was important to DOS.  That hasn't been important for almost
15 years.  So yes VESA likely suffors from neglegt on most video cards
these days.

> BIOS modes are not important to MS Windows.  So computer manufacturers
> don't put a lot of effort in making a wide variety of useful modes.
> Astonishing example: some of my notebooks don't have their own
> display's native mode in the BIOS.

I can believe that.  Somewhat sad, but again, they test that it works
well with windows, and everything else goes untested.

> The Intel drivers (except for the GMA 500) are quite good.  A year ago
> they went through some (memory management?) changes and were
> destablized for a while.  I think that they are OK now.

In general they are quite good.

> Actually, moving modesetting into the kernel has created a lot of
> transitional problems for all the drivers.  My guess is that it is due
> to undocumented hardware quirks that have to be discovered the hard
> way.

Well it involves moving work from drivers in X to the kernel and getting
the two to agree with each other.  A bit tricky I am sure.  It should
get stable eventually and the result will be great (no more issues moving
between text console and X).

-- 
Len Sorensen
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