Most modern drivers currently autodetect the proper video RAM amount on all hardware they support. Unfortunately, some X configuration tools allow users to override this option too easily, and if they "think" they have more video memory than they really do have, then they can create problems for themselves where those problems do not really need to exist, simply by incorrectly overspecifying their videoram amount, or in some cases underspecifying it - in particular with DRI and low memory.
I've had various problems tracked down to people specifying this where they need not and should not. As such, I'm trying to determine which video hardware really does require a manually specified videoRAM setting in order for the card to work properly. My goal is to disable this option by default in drivers which correctly detect video memory on all supported cards, at least for our shipped drivers. I've disabled this setting in our radeon driver for example as that driver correctly detects video memory on all supported hardware. Which other drivers might be safe candidates for this? All Nvidia hardware should autodetect properly IIRC, except possibly a few really old cards, in which case I could modify the driver to only allow that option on cards that explicitly require it. Ditto for the mga driver. If people (both other developers and end users) who _require_ the VideoRAM option in order for the proper amount of video memory to be useable with their card, could send me privately their: "lspci -vvn" or alternatively "scanpci" output (if lspci isn't available to them), that would help me assess how feasible this would be to do. My end-goal here, is to determine which hardware truely requires the VideoRAM option, and limit the usage of that option in our own XFree86 packages to those specific drivers and cards to limit the amount of bogus incoming bug reports and end user problems created by unnecessary overconfiguration. I might also add another option to re-enable VideoRAM override if people see cases where autodetection does work, but want to override it anyway, such as a global "AllowVideoRAMOverride" setting. ie: user has card with bad videoram, but by limiting videoram to a lower amount they can disable the bad area of memory. If this is considered to be a useful thing to do in the upstream XFree86 as well, please let me know and I'll be sure to submit the end result for possible inclusion in 4.4.0. -- Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
