On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 3:07 AM, Alex Deucher alexdeucher@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 12:33 PM, Egbert Eich eich@suse.de wrote:
The Radeon driver reduces the framebuffer resolution to 8bpp if a device with less than 32 Mb VRAM is found. This causes the framebuffer to run in 8 bit paletted mode. For a text console this is not an issue as 256 different colors is more than one gets on a VGA text console. It is done to give X more memory to work with since the console memory is not freed but remains allocated while X is active. Still, running the fbdev Xserver driver - which we do during installation
- will give applications an 8bit pseudo-color visual which doesn't look
too pretty. We therefore limit the framebuffer bpp to 16 when memory is 24MB or lower and to 8 only if 8MB or less VRAM is found. This should be a reasonable compromise for us. This patch will most likely not ever make it upstream.
This works around ugly modes on crappy IPMI cards using ES1000.
I don't have a strong opinion either way on this one.
Why would you use fbdev? package -modesetting at least if not the real ATI DDX.
Dave.