Frame buffer

Frame buffer

Posted Oct 12, 2005 19:02 UTC (Wed) by ncm (subscriber, #165)
Parent article: Review: Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger (Linux.com)

I wonder if the initrd/vesafb problem is fixed in Breezy.

I have a laptop with an nVidia display driver ("GeForce4 440"). When Ubuntu boots, it sets up it initrd and loads the VESA frame buffer driver. However, after it does its (advanced substitute for now-vilified?) pivot-root to the on-disk file system, and starts X, that driver interferes somehow with the chip initialization and/or X's nv driver. In practice, it means I can't switch my laptop display to drive an external monitor. Loading the nvidia frame buffer driver at boot time, everything's OK.

(I solved it by compiling the nvidia driver (and the rest) into a new kernel, and bypassing initrd on boot, but that seems unnecessary. I seem to recall that unloading vesafb and then loading nvidiafb didn't help.)

---

(Log in to post comments)