Nvidia driver + KMS for native boot resolution?
 

Nvidia's own driver has supported KMS for a while now i believe, and i've tried reading up on a few other Distro's wiki (particularly Arch and Gentoo's), and came to the conclusion that i should add these modules to my initrd:


I commented out the VGA setting in my /etc/lilo.conf which was previously set to VGA=792 (not native resolution).

Then rebuilt my initrd using this:
Running the suggested from the helper adds a bunch of fbdev/nvidia modules:
Then i reran /sbin/lilo and rebooted, but the resolution is low (large text). What am i missing to get this working?

For instance, when using the nouveau driver, the boot process will have smaller text on a 1920x1080 display for example, quite early in the boot process. I am trying to use the KMS within Nvidia's own driver for the same effect.

Does anyone know how to solve this?

Did you set a new, higher resolution code to replace it?

To find a suitable VESA code that your hardware supports, first enter some bogus setting e.g. vga = 123 (and run lilo). When you reboot you'll be told that that is an unsupported code and invite you to (amongst other options) hit the ENTER key to see a list of valid codes. Enter (and remember) the code you want and when bootup finishes, enter the new code into lilo.conf and don't forget to run lilo afterward to ensure the new setting takes effect.

chris

And here's a quicker way to find the supported modes (as root):chris

Which Slackware package contains this hwinfo of which you speak ?

Hello,

hwinfo can be found here.

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SeB

Yes I forgot - as phenixia2003 says, it's from the SBo hwinfo package. Sorry about that.

chris

Hello,

According to this post and this note, it seems that nvidia kms does not support fbdev :

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SeB

Ah, so it still isn't really supported then. Looking through that thread i see some things i've also tried like nvidia-drm.modeset=1 with no luck, so i guess it still lacks fbdev support.

As for choosing VGA setting. I'd gotten VGA=792 from years ago using something like hwinfo, and always found that value to be the best approximate fit for a 1920x1080 display.

Suppose we still have to wait for nvidia to add proper support. Thanks though.

Alright, my output on hwinfo contains this:
How do i use these values?

For instance:Would that be: Or do i need to convert that value to something like VGA=792 ?

I use the hex format for machines using lilo, since that's how they're referred to in /etc/lilo.conf_example.

BTW, I think decimal for 0x034d would be 845 (not 792, which would be 0x318 i.e. 1024x768x24)

chris

Thanks, either way works. For some reason though, when booting, the framebuffer has a black border of about an inch or two.

As soon as i "startx" and then switch to a tty, the resolution has changed and my shell prompt now appears at the actual edge of the screen. Not sure why that happens, but it's nicer having a higher resolution however.

I'm curious as to what advantage you think you get by using anything more complex than nVidia's own installer outside of X in CLI?

I can't speak for OP but one reason I have looked into this previously myself was a situation where the normal boot time information on screen (before X runs) disappeared. As it was a novel design (at the time) with 14 screens across 4 graphics cards in a previously untried mobo, as well as it being my first exposure to UEFI, I was pretty keen to see all the boot time output I could. It was OK if X came up but if it didn't there wasn't much I could do without seeing what errors had occurred - not to mention invisible console.

A more common need/desire is for a higher resolution fame buffer than the default while booting (like nouveau driver provides).

chris

Along with the resolution being set correctly, the console output is very sluggish using VGA settings higher than the default, and there's alot of flicker when watching videos with mplayer for example. I would assume that behaviour would go away if you could get the same behaviour as what the nouveau driver does on the console.

When you say sluggish are referring to it being very slow to respond, for instance scrolling or when you're compiling a program on console?