Re: i830M video chip (X driver deficient)

[ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman)]

Blue Lang <blue@b-side.org> writes:

> On Thu, 11 Apr 2002, Michael De Nil wrote:
> 
> > i searched on the intel-website, which told me hat i should be able to
> > change this setting in my bios. *not*
> >
> > can't i reserve any more ram myselve by selecting linux only to use 256 -
> > 8 Meg or something @ boot-time ?
> 
> the dell c400 has this same problem. there is an excellent web page on one
> person's experiences with it, but i can't find it right now.. anyways, his
> result was that the bios was actually broken and that it would take a f/w
> update from Dell to fix it. a little googling should yield the results you
> want.
> 
> i assume it's probably the same situation with your laptop.

It isn't memory related at all.  The problem is that the X driver uses 
the video BIOS to set the display modes, instead of setting the
display mode by itself as it should.  I don't know if there are enough
docs available from intel about this but that is the problem.

I have a coworker with one of these and I tracked problem down that
far.  With agpgart the kernel allocates the rest of the memory for X
as needed.

Eric