Problems with No Video

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mag
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue May 07, 2013 2:00 am

Problems with No Video

Post by mag »

I have experimented with installing various versions of Linux on the Fit-PC 2i and keep having the same problem; which is I end up with no video moments after proceeding from GRUB, before anything is displayed. This includes Linux Mint 13, which this site has install instructions for.

This is more basic than an issue with X-Windows. The same thing happens with a console-only installation. The one tweak I’ve found that allows for working video is to prevent the gma500_gfx driver from loading by adding a “gma500_gfx.dummy=1” parameter to the kernel boot line. I’d rather be able to use the proper driver than fall back on the generic VESA driver though.

My monitor’s native resolution is 1920x1200 and this is my only guess as to what could be different from other people’s cases. I’ve tried many forms of forcing a conservative resolution at boot time to no avail (e.g., using GRUB_GFXMODE and GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=1024x768, etc.). Also, I can’t tell for sure from reading other people’s experiences, but it seems they end up with a non-native resolution in cases their display isn’t in the built-in resolution table rather than getting no video signal.

Note: my machine has the latest 9/24/10 BIOS, 1G of RAM; and the machine isn’t crashing completely, I can SSH to it when it’s finished booting.

Any idea what is going on here?

prj
Posts: 90
Joined: Tue May 12, 2009 9:13 am

Re: Problems with No Video

Post by prj »

I don't know what kernel versions you've tried but a while back we didn't support 1920x1200 framebuffers in gma500_gfx since they didn't fit in the memory reserved by BIOS at boot (usually 8MB).

If you know how to compile a kernel you can try my gma500-next branch at:
git://www.github.com/patjak/drm-gma500

That might solve your problems.

mag
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue May 07, 2013 2:00 am

Re: Problems with No Video

Post by mag »

I don't know what kernel versions you've tried but a while back we didn't support 1920x1200 framebuffers in gma500_gfx since they didn't fit in the memory reserved by BIOS at boot (usually 8MB).
I have done the bulk of my testing with Ubuntu 12.10, although I tried Mint 13 and 12.04 also. Ubuntu 12.10 uses kernel 3.5.0. I recently tried 13.04 with the same results. The kernel on that is 3.8.0.

I did come across a message where a guy was having troubles with 1920x1200 on the gma500 that were fixed with a driver update, but it was from nearly 2 years ago.

Should the 1920x1200 support be in 3.5.0 (or 3.8.0) or is it even more recent that that? I'll try the kernel from your git repository but I'm assuming the changes you're talking about predate the kernels I've tried.

mag
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue May 07, 2013 2:00 am

Re: Problems with No Video

Post by mag »

I can confirm this is a problem with the 1920x1200 resolution (or possibly something more specific to my monitor). I tried the machine on a 1024x768 monitor and the video worked.

prj, is there a reason why specifying "video=1024x768" in the kernel parameters wouldn't make the driver run in that resolution on a 1920x1200 monitor? I had tried that with no success. (And it's not a limitation of my monitor, it can display a 1024x768 signal.)

prj
Posts: 90
Joined: Tue May 12, 2009 9:13 am

Re: Problems with No Video

Post by prj »

I did some digging and realized I've been working on this before. The thing is, we still don't support console framebuffers larger than 8mb. To work around this on high resolution displays we fall back to 16bpp. This works fine for me but obviously not for everyone. The modesetting driver in X can handle non-linear framebuffers so it is not affected by this limitation.

You can try to fiddle more with the video parameter. Here's some documentation:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ke ... de_Setting

Maybe you need to be more specific, like "video=1024x768-32@60" and perhaps even specify the DVI connector.

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