Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 107712
Unable to choose 1400x1050 resolution for laptop
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:32 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030908 Epiphany/0.9.2 Description of problem: I've got a NEC Versa P520 laptop that won't work at it's default resolution of 1400x1050. Looks like it's maybe a problem in the i810 drivers just not supporting the resolution? Anyway, I also chose Generic LCD 1400x1050 during installation. Changing the XF86-Config manually or using 'change resolution' in the menu afterwards also didn't work. It's always 1280x1024 or 1024x786. Problem is still there, also in the latest fedora core (test 3). Tell me if you need the X11 logs or anything else. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always
Seems that the problem is indeed the i810 driver. It checks the BIOS for supported video modes. It seems that 1400x1050 is not in that list of supported video modes. The reason this resolution does work in windows is that the windows driver doesn't ask the BIOS but has its own detecting routines I guess. I don't know if the problem lies with NEC or the i810 driver. Intel provided a new VBIOS which seems to solve the problem, but laptop manufacturers should still roll that new VBIOS into their own BIOS. Think this bug won't be fixed in months...
What kinda of video card is this? I had the same problem (with ATI cards) and I discovered that anaconda was detecting my card as the right vendor but the wrong model. 1 quick change to the driver and I was able to get 10400x1050.
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corp. 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [VGA]) Subsystem: NEC Corporation: Unknown device 81ec Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 10 Memory at d8000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=128M] Memory at d0000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=512K] I/O ports at de00 [size=8] Capabilities: <available only to root> 00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corp. 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02) Subsystem: NEC Corporation: Unknown device 81ec Flags: fast devsel Memory at 20000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [disabled] [size=128M] Memory at 28000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [disabled] [size=512K] Capabilities: <available only to root>
Changing component to XFree86 since it looks like it's a driver problem.
This problem is twofold: 1) The Intel i810 video driver uses the VESA BIOS to program vidoe modes, and is thus strictly limited to using whatever modes the BIOS has had built into it. 2) This is not a bug, but rather just a limitation of the current Intel driver's video hardware support. In order to bypass this limitation requires having detailed technical specifications for Intel's graphic chipsets in order to program the mode timings directly into the chipset rather than having to go through the BIOS, which is what the Windows video drivers do. Unfortunately, Intel has not provided patches for the i810 driver to enable manual programming of the mode setting hardware, and the technical specifcations that would be required for this support to be implemented by open source developers, has not been made publically available. The downside of this problem, is that there is nothing we can do to improve support in this driver for native mode switching until Intel updates the driver and provides patches to the X development community, or provides the necessary specifications for someone in the community to do the work improving the driver in a future release of X. While this isn't really a solution, about all I can recommend for now, is for people who experience this problem to contact their laptop vendors, and politely request that they provide better hardware support for the Linux operating system. Closing as 'UPSTREAM' for the time being, as we have no way of supporting this without it being done upstream first.
While at the Ottawa Linux Symposium this year, I learned that the reason the Intel driver uses the video BIOS VBE routines for setting video mode, is because Intel does not own all of the intellectual property in their integrated graphics solutions, and thus they do not have the legal right to provide the documentation or source code to developers to write the code to program the video mode directly. Likewise, they can not contribute code to do this either, presumeably without violating NDA agreements. As such, all hardware using Intel integrated graphics chipsets, will be limited to the video modes supported by the video BIOS more or less perpetually under Linux/X11 systems. If a video mode is not supported by the BIOS, then it unfortunately will not be available to X11 to use, and there is no way to workaround this issue in the X driver, so it will more or less never be fixed in the future on the X11 side of things. The only way laptops will work with X11 at their native resolution, is if their video BIOS supports the native resolution in it's VBE implementation. This burden is unfortunately upon the manufacturer of the laptop to ensure their video BIOS supports their native resolution in VBE. Without this support directly in the BIOS from the hardware vendor, there is no solution to this problem unless Intel is able to provide source code or specifications in the future to enable the BIOS limitation to be worked around directly in the Intel video driver. Setting status to "WONTFIX"