Friendly reminder about Nvidia and vesafb for those unaware

narz · 12-16-2013, 03:26 AM

Sup guys. I'm sure anyone who uses Nvidia's proprietary driver has seen this in their logs at some point:

Quote:

Your system is not currently configured to drive a VGA console on the primary VGA device. The NVIDIA Linux graphics driver requires the use of a text-mode VGA console. Use of other console drivers including, but not limited to, vesafb, may result in corruption and stability problems, and is not supported.

Now personally I've always used the vesa framebuffer console with nvidia's drivers and haven't really had any problems doing so, until a couple days ago. When xdm started up, all the characters were corrupt and X froze up when I tried to log in. I looked at the Xorg log and saw some nvidia conflict errors or something along those lines so I just reset vga to normal in lilo. I'm assuming it was a vesafb conflict. So even if it works ok 99.9% of the time, I guess it might fail the other 0.1%.

That's it

Didier Spaier · 12-16-2013, 04:04 AM

... And on the other hand, users of open source 'nouveau' driver for NVIDIA cards should be aware of some incompatibilities as well as stated in this page:

Code:

Your boot time virtual console display driver affects the compatibility of nouveaufb:

    VGA text mode: works
    vesafb: works (hand-over) (more reliable for >= 2.6.35)
    efifb: works (hand-over) (fixed in 2.6.33, commit; more reliable for >= 2.6.35)
    offb: might work (hand-over) after fixes in offb (merged in 2.6.33), but still some problems
    vga16fb: works (hand-over) (>= 2.6.35)
    uvesafb: does not work
    nvidiafb: does not work (does not make sense, either)
    rivafb: does not work (ditto)
    anything else: most likely does not work
    nvidia, the proprietary driver: does not work (included in the list of incompatible kernel modules, just for completeness)