how do I get the console on all monitors (multi-gpu) ?

[nasaiya]

Once upon a time, I booted up my gentoo system, and was greeted by the console on whichever monitor I happened to turn on... it was the same thing on all monitors, but it was _on_ all monitors...

Now it only shows up on one of them.

I'm not talking about anything X11 related.. just the normal console...

I would imagine this is easily solved by a kernel option or something similar but I sure can't find it! Please enlighten me!

Thanks!
_________________
If it ain't broke - fix it till it is!

[Ant P.]

KMS does this by default. What driver are you using?

[nasaiya]

Thanks for the reply.

I was not aware of KMS, but a couple searches led me to try changing framebuffer console drivers in an attempt to make it work. That failed so I then disabled framebuffer console support entirely. I also noticed on the archlinux wiki they mentioned that any "vga=" or similar option in bootloader configs could interfere with the KMS behavior so I also removed that from my lilo.conf.

Still no luck though... am I correct in assuming you were referring to fbcon drivers? Or did you mean something else I'm not aware of?

[Ant P.]

Yes, those are the fbcon drivers. You'll know if you have them working correctly because /proc/fb will list something with "drm" in the name.

[nasaiya]

Well you've definitely got me started in the right direction - Thanks!

I think I failed to think this question through completely before posting... I think the actual issue is can I have simultaneous output on multiple graphics cards? I recently added a second one so I could run triple-head with X... and it just so happens that the motherboard thinks the second one is the primary (at least I assume so because that's where the bios messages appear)... which is fine because I can switch slots if need be, but it would be very nice to have an fbcon on both cards...

I didn't post back till now because I hadn't had time to actually research the multi-gpu issue, and I generally prefer to try to research before asking for help.

That being said, any idea if this is possible? Or more specifically is there a particular driver you could point me to that supports this? I've been playing with uvesafb a little, and I use the proprietary nvidia drivers (both cards are nvidia) for X so nvidia is out as far as I know...

This seems to be a difficult topic to search for or rather figure out what to search to find what I need!

Thanks!

[Ant P.]

If you're using proprietary drivers and uvesafb then it's unlikely to ever work properly.