Hi Thomas,

On 11-Oct-25 5:17 PM, Thomas Zimmermann wrote:
> Hi Hans
> 
> Am 11.10.25 um 12:02 schrieb Hans de Goede:
>> Hi,
>>
>> A while ago I did a blogpost about not having the native GPU drivers in
>> the initrd: https://hansdegoede.dreamwidth.org/28291.html
>>
>> With the Fedora /boot partition size increase there has been renewed
>> interest in this and as a result I got an interesting comment on
>> the blog post pointing out that there are EFI protocols to get EDID
>> info for the monitor (presumably for the one the GOP has lit up).
>>
>> It would be useful to see if we can hook this up so that the simpledrm
>> device can report the physical dimensions of the screen and the boot
>> splash does not need to guess the DPI and thus does not need to guess
>> whether to do hiDPI scaling or not. The comment is here:
>>
>> https://hansdegoede.dreamwidth.org/28291.html?thread=14467#cmt14467
>>
>> and it points to:
>>
>> https://uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/2_-_AMD_UEFI_Plugfest_EDID_Spring2012.pdf
>> https://uefi.org/specs/UEFI/2.9_A/12_Protocols_Console_Support.html
>>
>> Unfortunately I do not have time to work on this myself, hence this
>> email in the hope that someone else can pick this idea up.
> 
> There are now efidrm and vesadrm, which support specifically the features 
> that we get from the rsp. standards, hardware  and bootloader. For VESA and 
> EFI the EDID can be transferred from grub via bootparams. A patch [1] is on 
> its way into upstream grub. The Linux kernel stores that data in edid_info, 
> from where it is picked up by efidrm and vesadrm.  If the EFI framebuffer 
> comes directly from the EFI calls, we need to implement this in the kernel, 
> but the principle is the same. I also have ideas for making this work on 
> Coreboot.
> 
> For simpledrm, I'd rather strip if from the ability to use EFI/VESA 
> framebuffers and focus on simple-framebuffer DT nodes. These sometimes come 
> with DPI information. Maybe we could extend the DT to support EDID as well.
> 
> [1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2025-10/msg00043.html
> 
> I have long been working on all this and it is now slowly coming together.

Cool, thank you for working on this!

I agree that if we are going to have efidrm and vesadrm that
making simpledrm a DT platform thing only makes sense.

I do wonder about the choice to primarily make the EDID passing
a grub thing though.

Some distros are actively trying to move away from grub since
grub is quite a complex beast and they are trying to move to
something simpler like systemd-boot. As such it would be a good
idea IMHO if efidrm could directly get the EDID from EFI itself.

Note I'm afraid I don't really have time to work on this myself.

Regards,

Hans


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