disable fbcon, but keep directfb?
 

Hello all,

I have a fairly old (slow) laptop with a mach64 video chip that I've just thrown Gentoo on. X and everything runs pretty decent, but there's one thing I'd like fixed that I can't figure out how to:

I want my VT consoles in 80x50 text mode, and I want them to stay that way. :)

Getting the console into 80x50 text mode is easy, I just set vga=1 in /etc/lilo.conf. This works fine, but unfortunately the kernel thinks better and switches the console to SVGA mode right after the atyfb driver is loaded.

I've tried disabling CONFIG_FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE support in the kernel (which I assumed would fix the problem), but this results in the kernel still changing the video mode after the atyfb init, but simply not remapping the VT console to it -- so I can't see anything until after qingy kicks in.

I don't want to disable DirectFB completely, because I need it for Qingy and TuxOnIce.

And I know it's going to be asked, so I'll answer it ahead of time: the reason why I want my VT consoles in text mode is because scrolling is slow in graphics mode on this laptop. Plus, I prefer true text mode in general when I'm not using X.

Any suggestions? I'm hoping it's just a simple kernel option I've missed in the config somewhere...

After a bit of playing around with kernel parameters, I found that passing "video=atyfb:off" keeps the console in text mode, but unfortunately also disables frame buffer support completely (so I can't use Qingy).

I'm beginning to think that the atyfb driver itself sets the video mode regardless upon initialization, which seems like a bug to me. If the console isn't remapped to use the frame buffer (CONFIG_FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE=n), then changing the video mode is pointless because nothing will be visible on the display until an app using DirectFB is initialized.

I guess it's time to dig into the atyfb sources and make a patch... *sigh*

I've found this, which outlines the documentation on fbcon, and pretty much describes my situation -- the VGA driver will typically always take over the console.

As the documentation mentions, I figured the kernel parameter "fbcon=map:1" would work, but unfortunately it didn't have any effect at all. I'm also unable to use "echo 0 > /sys/class/vtconsole/vtcon1/bind", it doesn't have any effect, and doing a "cat bind" always shows 1.

I was able to do a "vbatool save" to get the mode data at 80x50 text mode, but doing a "vbetool restore" with that data file just resulted in a black screen for me.

Since this thread has been just me so far, and I'm really running out of things to try here -- any information or ideas, or even a suggestion of a better place to ask my original question would be helpful.

Thanks!