Mike Harris has asked for testing of the Vesa video driver, which could be used for a "safe mode" in Fedora. The problem is that many BIOS's Vesa modes are broken, so he needs a good blacklist of broken situations with the Vesa driver. This bug is meant to be a tracker for all the failure bug reports that get generated for Cards that appear to have problems with using the Vesa driver. Doing The Testing: Testing a Card for use with the Vesa driver invovles reconfiguring the X config(this will most likely have to be done by hand editting the config file, i don't know if r-c-xfree86 can be used for this) to use the vesa driver (man vesa) and then reviewing the X log output to determine which graphics modesthe Vesa driver supports for the video hardware. Each supported video mode listed in the X log should be tested to see if there is an obvious failure/problem. A simple start of the X server, and fire up an app or two with no on screen corruption or crash is a good enough quick test. Then, for any failures we need a bug report, with config file, log file, full details, and lspci -vvn Filing a Bug: *Please also use this Summary string when filing a bug Vesa Driver Testing Failure for [video card name] *give as much detail as you can in the description. If multiple modes have problems, please detail all of them here. *attach the output of the lspci -vvn command *attach for each problematic mode: X config file X log file *When filing a bug please set this tracking bug as a blocker for the bug you file. That way all relevant bugreports will show up in the dependancy list for this tracking bug report. This will greatly help make sure your bugreport on this testing issue is not lost in the vast sea of bugreports. Files of note: /etc/X11/XF86Config config file /var/log/XFree86.0.log log file
<mharris> "It is important for users to realize, that the "vesa" driver itself, is not much of a video driver. It does not do much work at all, instead it makes calls into the video card's VESA BIOS ROM, which programs the card appropriately. Any bugs in the BIOS, may result in non working video, and since the problem is not in the driver, but in the BIOS, and we can not fix a ROM BIOS, such problems are essentially unfixable via software. The video manufacturer can fix a broken BIOS by providing a flash ROM update. </mharris> so to sum up. This testing is ONLY to try to determine a blacklist of hardware that will not work with a vesa driven 'safe mode.' This testing is not meant to fix any outstanding hardware issue, but to get a lay of the land of existing working/broken hardware so a possible 'safe mode' functionality can be created.
In particular, it would be nice for users to test every video mode and color depth combination that their video card supports in it's BIOS. These can be shown in the X log file after starting up the server. It will require some minimal reconfiguration either by hand editing the config file or using our redhat-config-xfree86 config tool (system-config-xfree86 in rawhide). If someone doesn't have the time to test all of that, or for some other reason can not test it all, such as hrdware limitations, what would be nice, would be if they could at least test 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768 resolutions using color depth 24, 16, and optionally 8. That would provide the minimal amount of testing for me to have a "safe mode" video driver matrix I believe.
Nobody seemed to respond to my vesa driver testing requests, and no further comments were added to the report, or sent via email, etc. so I'm closing this tracker as "WONTFIX" for now, since it isn't really tracking anything now anyway. Setting status to "WONTFIX"