# Nvidia driver VESA warning from latest release.

## binro

I have just nvidia-drivers-295.59 and the driver now emits a warning message:

Jun 16 21:54:21 topaz kernel: NVRM: loading NVIDIA UNIX x86_64 Kernel Module  295.59  Wed Jun  6

21:19:40 PDT 2012

Jun 16 21:54:21 topaz kernel: NVRM: Your system is not currently configured to drive a VGA conso

le

Jun 16 21:54:21 topaz kernel: NVRM: on the primary VGA device. The NVIDIA Linux graphics driver

Jun 16 21:54:21 topaz kernel: NVRM: requires the use of a text-mode VGA console. Use of other co

nsole

Jun 16 21:54:21 topaz kernel: NVRM: drivers including, but not limited to, vesafb, may result in

Jun 16 21:54:21 topaz kernel: NVRM: corruption and stability problems, and is not supported.

I have no VESA modules loaded and the console looks fine.  :Smile:  Searching, I found there is already a thread about this on the ARCH forums which point to this Nvidia post: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=2561806&postcount=39 which says VESA was really never supported but seemed to work! In my kernel config I have:

```

CONFIG_FB_BOOT_VESA_SUPPORT=y

CONFIG_FB_VESA=y

```

so I turned VESA off and rebuilt the kernel with only VGA support. Then the message no longer appeared but I had elephant fonts on the console, so I reverted the kernel and decided to live with the message. Anybody have some thoughts about this? Please don't suggest Nouveau, I persevered with it for a year before getting tired of the constant regressions that caused mplayer to lock up the box.

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## roarinelk

nvidia engineers say their blob has problems with suspend/resume and framebuffer consoles,

hence this note to please use vga console only.  My limited testing shows they're right :)

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## Ant P.

The link is correct, vesafb has never been designed to work around proprietary drivers and only works coincidentally. If you try to switch VTs more than once per cold boot it's likely to corrupt the screen or lock up.

This is a normal and expected price to pay for buying Linux-unfriendly hardware and drivers. You can have a 80x25 console at boot or extra system instability, the choice is yours.

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## aCOSwt

 *Ant P. wrote:*   

> ...vesafb has never been designed to work around proprietary drivers and only works coincidentally.

 

Could you elaborate please. (Not that I say this is not correct, just that I do not understand)

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## Ant P.

You have two kernel-mode drivers accessing the same hardware at the same time. It's like having multiple processes writing to the same file at once, if they're not aware of each other the end result will be garbage. It only works here because vesafb stops doing things when you switch to VT7 which doesn't have an active console.

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