# System BIOS limits videoram, affecting avail. resolutions

## neiras

Greetings, everyone. There are a couple of other threads that seem to refer to this problem in general.

I recently purchased a Dell Inspiron 2600 after making sure there were Linux drivers for all of its hardware. It's a 'cheaper' laptop, but it's nice enough for my purposes. Naturally, the first thing I did was start Gentoo Linux building.

15 hours later, I had a built and installed KDE3/XFree86, and began setting up X. No joy. I was limited to an insanely bad resolution and putrid bit depth. I did some research, and came up with a culprit - the Dell system BIOS.

In a nutshell, the BIOS limits "legacy video ram" to 1MB at startup, and XFree86/Linux just can't seem to reset it to something more reasonable. This sticks me in what looks like 640x480@4bit color.  To make matters worse, the BIOS menu doesn't allow me to set the initial limit. BeOS, AtheOS, and even Windows all seem to work fine.

I've been looking for a kernel parameter to address this issue, but I've had no luck so far. If you have any idea how to convince Linux to allocate, say, 8MB of initial VRAM, i'd be thrilled - and you'll have solved a problem that appears to be affecting many people in this forum.

Until then, I'm stuck in Windows XP.

My video: Intel 830M dual headed (Tornado chipset, handled by the i810 driver) using *shared system ram as the vram*

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## klieber

 *neiras wrote:*   

> If you have any idea how to convince Linux to allocate, say, 8MB of initial VRAM, i'd be thrilled

 

There is a special module (or modules?) required for the i810 chipset.  I believe you have to have agpgart enabled in your kernel and I think there's an i810-specific module as well.

A quick google search came up with this result as well as many others.  You might check there, and then search google if that doesn't solve the issue.

I don't use the i810, so I can't offer more specifics.  

--kurt

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## Guest

I have the AGP GART support for I810 in the kernel, as well as the correct xserver driver. The problem is that it can't seem to enlage the AGP aperture to anything better than 1MB.

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## Ludwig

Check this article :

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/linux/c400.html

It concerned the intel i830 chipset but I think it's the same problem.

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## ravnx

I have a Sony Vaio Laptop that uses the intel 815e onboard video card.. There is a kernel patch at http://i810fb.sourceforge.net, however after 4 hours of playing with gentoo-sources, I gave up and had vanilla-sources patched and recompiled in 20 minutes. I can now boot to 1024x768x16bpp right after grub (it puts the option to compile the driver into the kernel under framebuffer devices).

-Mike

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## jay

Had a same issue with the intel830 video onboard card on my laptop. Luckily my manufacturer (ASUS) provided an BIOS update for the ASUS L2400 which solved the small video ram issue. Sadly DELL doesn't care for his Linux customers.

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## raziel

This is an issue which is actually fixed in the current XFree CVS and will appear officially in XFree 4.3.0. 

If you need linux support NOW, you could grab the CVS tree and try that. It was pretty stable for me while I was running Gentoo on my Sony Vaio R505EL.

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