Re: gfxterm and vesa

[Vesa Jääskeläinen]

Robert Millan wrote:
> On Fri, May 11, 2007 at 09:31:03AM -0300, Otavio Salvador wrote:
>> Jonny <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> Robert Millan <address@hidden> write:
>>>
>>>> Can you try 800x600x32 and 640x480x8 ?
>>> Since my machine is't supporting a 32-bit color, 800x600x32 can't be used. 
>>> If 
>>> it's 800x600x24, it works well.
>> Ah nice. Robert, I think we might reduce the color depth used by
>> default. We might even use 16 instead of 24 IMHO. What do you think?
> 
> Not sure.. does 16 work on all machines?  What about old PCs that don't
> support VESA at all?  I think we should have some way to probe all this
> stuff before enabling gfxterm.
> 
> The X people use discover and xresprobe.  Perhaps we could do that too?
> 
> As short term, if you think 640x480x16 is a reasonable default, we could set
> that.  But since this part of code belongs to upstream, I'd like to see if
> they have some comments about it (forwarding).
> 
> GRUB maintainers (specialy daChaac), do you have any comments on this?
> 

Video mode setup function tries to use all available video drivers to
initialize video mode. It uses first it founds working. So if someone
writes VGA driver then you can add it to queue and if VBE2+ is not
available then it would try next driver, in this case it would be VGA
driver.

You can specify video mode to be 800x600 without color depth so it will
use most colorful mode it finds. But if first adapter has 800x600x16 and
second would have 800x600x32 then it would take first as there was valid
mode.

Other option would be to probe for modes and then select one. But this
should be in script or in custom module code. Or gfxmode would be
extended to allow multiple selections like 1024x768;800x600;640x480.
Also there are starting to be lots of wide screen LCD's that should be
somehow supported too. I think that Video API do not have any limitation
on this regard.