On Mit, 2012-10-24 at 18:33 +0200, Egbert Eich 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.
Is it not possible for xf86-video-fbdev to choose a higher depth anyway, even if specified explicitly in xorg.conf or on the Xorg command line?
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 last sentence seems stale here. :)