The fix was unsuccessful coming from one person on the Dell forums who tried it (I think some others are going to try it though - I posted it on the Gentoo forums).
Thanks for your efforts... if another possible workaround surfaces, I'd be glad to give it a try (or find someone who will =). Another idea... if no software/driver workaround is possible and Dell refuses to update/fix their BIOS, is there any feasible way of modifying the BIOS independant of Dell? ie. grabbing the image file and finding where it specifies 832KB (or whatever it sets it to... 896 or something?) and changing that to around 8MB? I'm not sure if the BIOS could be interpretted or not though (seen in assembly - or just a bunch of bits). Is this possible?... legal? Definately risky, I know. -Oliver David Dawes wrote: > > On Thu, Jun 26, 2003 at 09:35:52AM -0500, Oliver Wong wrote: > >Hello all, > > > >I recently purchased a Dell D400, which suffers from a BIOS only > >allocating <1MB of legacy video memory (stolen memory) to the integrated > >graphics... I believe the Dell 500m and other 855GM laptops suffer from > >this as well. The BIOS also does not provide the appropriate mechanisms > >for the current drivers to change that. > > > >Researching, I found that the Dell C400 and other similar laptops had > >this problem too (with an older chipset), but a work around was written > >(by Abraham vd Merwe?). Does anyone know if a similar work around could > >be applied to the 855GM's? Or is the chipset radically different so that > >that fix will not work? > > That method didn't work on the test hardware I had access to when > adding the 855GM support. The driver does implement a new method > for informing the video BIOS about additional memory allocations, > but I haven't seen any evidence of production hardware implementing > it yet. > > You could try the attached patch, which should enable the old 830M > method for all platforms, and let me know if it works. It's possible > that Dell has the old method implemented in their video BIOS. > > If it doesn't work, you'll need to follow it up with Dell. > > David > -- > David Dawes > Founder/committer/developer The XFree86 Project > www.XFree86.org/~dawes > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > biosmem.diffName: biosmem.diff > Type: Plain Text (text/plain) _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
