Took a while to send this, since I wanted to double check what I wrote. On Tue, Feb 18, 2003 at 09:17:27PM -0800, Troy Arnold wrote: > On Tue, Feb 18, 2003 at 04:46:03PM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > - get rid of the VGA VESA frame buffer mode that is enabled in that kernel. > > > > This weekend I discovered that you can turn off the vesa frame buffer > > with a boot time command line option: > > === > > video=vga16:off > > === > > Yup, it's documented in Debian's lilo.conf along with: > #vga=ask > > Which gives you some other modes to choose from. The mode that I > happen to prefer is not in the list: > vga=0x305
I'm am a little puzzled... vga= and video= do completely different things. I do not see where the "video=vga16:off" option is documented in the default lilo.conf or any other files on a installed Debian system. I see "vga=" options documented in many places like /usr/src/linux/Documentation/svga.txt and mentioned in lilo.conf, but that configures the vga mode (screen size of text consoles in characters). Whereas "video=" options effect the framebuffer system (size in pixels, bits per pixel, refresh rate), and appear to be documented sporadically in /usr/src/linux/Documentation/fb (depending on the device that is the framebuffer like vga16 is not documented at all). I stumbled upon the video= option while reading the special bootup options on the debian bf2.4 install disks... F5 - SPECIAL BOOT ARGUMENTS - VARIOUS HARDWARE ==== HARDWARE PARAMETER TO SPECIFY Disable framebuffer for monitor video=vga16:off ==== I was surprised to see it mentioned there. I hunted through documentation looking for an option like that maybe a year ago and couldn't find any option to disable framebuffer. I still can't find documentation on the "vga16" framebuffer driver... > > - the stock kernels don't enabled DMA mode by default on many systems. > > Also one can enable dma mode with another boottime option: > > === > > ide0=dma ide1=dma > > === > > There's also the 'hdparm' command: > hdparm -d 1 -m16 /dev/hda > -d 1 == turn on DMA > -m16 == turn on multi-sector IO > > These two options vastly improve performance on modern IDE drives. Yes, I thought so too... I used to use: -d 1 -m 16 -c 1 -u 1 In my own testing I found that multi-block mode doesn't appear to improve performance if dma mode is available. If dma mode is available enable that and it's as good as you get. If dma is _not_ available (because it's a really old IDE drive), then multi-mode helps some. _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
