ATI Radeon & framebuffer resolution

[Romanujan]

Not so long ago I have bought Gigabyte ATI Radeon 5750 graphics card. Unfortunately, this decision have one drawback I didn't realize before buying it: my cards VESA BIOS does not support any wide-screen resolution (in particular, it doesn't have 1680x1050, which is native for my LCD panel). Is there any possibility to force it to display GRUB and uvesafb console framebuffer in resolution not supported by VESA BIOS? I am currently using GRUB 0.97 with gfxmenu patch, but I plan to migrate to GRUB 2 in a near future.

I remember, that many years ago, while possessing S3 Trio 64 V+ card, I was using a DOS based VBE 2.0 TSR before starting Linux with Loadlin (I don't remember whether I needed it for SVGALib or console framebuffer, but it worked). I also know about some project to allow uvesafb to run in Eeee PC native resolution. Also, the Chameleon boot loader for hackintosh machines is able to patch the VBE on NVidia and ATI cards... I have tried to find some utility for BIOS editing, but I am yet to find one that supports my graphics card.

Any ideas?

[quarksoup]

With uvesafb installed what's the output of

Code: Select all

less /sys/devices/platform/uvesafb.0/graphics/fb0/modes

[Romanujan]

Here is the output:

Code: Select all

U:1400x1050p-0
U:1400x1050p-59
V:1280x1024p-75
V:1280x1024p-60
V:1280x960p-60
V:1152x864p-75
V:1024x768p-75
V:1024x768p-70
V:1024x768p-60
V:800x600p-75
V:800x600p-72
V:800x600p-60
V:800x600p-56
V:640x480p-75
V:640x480p-72
V:640x480p-60
U:1400x1050p-59
U:1280x960p-59
U:1152x864p-59
U:720x400p-59
U:640x350p-59
U:512x384p-60
U:320x240p-60
U:320x200p-59
U:1280x1024p-59
U:1024x768p-60
U:800x600p-59
U:640x480p-60
U:640x400p-59

[quarksoup]

The highest resolution that your uvesafb supports is 1400x1050.

Do an emerge of lrmi and run vbetest, that should give you an extended list of all the fb resolutions that your video card can support. lrmi and the output of .../fb0/modes agree for the most part with my ATI x800 and none of them match my screen's native 1680x1050. If you find a match the number in brackets is the mode for that resolution and you should be able to pass it to the kernel with "vga=xyz".

[Romanujan]

For some reason, lrmi package is masked on my AMD64 platform (missing keyword) - and, checking Google about it, I am not surprised...

But I doubt it will help - I have checked with hwinfo, and my cards' BIOS simply does not have 1680x1050. I need to extend it somehow - either by reflashing my card (using either edited original BIOS, or BIOS for some other card), or using some hack similar to this what Chameleon or 915resolution does...