On Tue, 18 Jun 2002, Mike Honeyman wrote:

>Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2002 10:55:19 -0600
>From: Mike Honeyman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Content-Type: text/plain;
>  charset="us-ascii"
>List-Id: General X Discussion <xpert.XFree86.Org>
>Subject: Gateway 1450se w/Intel 830m
>
>I recently purchased a Gateway 1450se, which uses the Intel 830m chipset. I 
>have compiled the kernel with AGP GART support, along with the support for 
>the i810,i815,i830m adapters. The system BIOS has dedicated 8 megs of ram for 
>video, but for some reason, when I use the configuration suggested by both 
>XFree86.org and Intel, I get an error that says there is not enough memory to 
>support the mode selected. I am having to use the vesa driver, which with 8 
>megs of ram, should give me up to 1024x768 resolution, but the best I can get 
>is 640x480. I am sure this means that even though the BIOS is dedicating the 
>proper amount of memory, the system itself is only seeing 512K or so. Does 
>anyone have any suggestions? At this point, I am dual booting with Windows 
>XP, but would like dump XP all together. Any help would be much appreciated.

There are now various laptops out there which use the Intel i830m 
and do not follow Intel's documentation aparently.  These laptops 
lock-in the stolen memory to 1Mb or possibly even less, and do 
not allow the user to properly configure it in the CMOS settings.

In these cases, it is a BIOS flaw, and Intel comments to that 
effect on the Intel developer site.  In lieu of a BIOS update for 
such laptops, the only way to work around the issue is to have 
the video driver program the chipset directly.

There was a patch floating around which claimed to fix this, 
however testing the patch resulted in a non working driver that 
did not solve the problems either.  

Intel has not yet released the i830 documentation to the public
however to my knowledge, and so there's no way anyone can write a
proper workaround.  Does anyone have a contact at Intel who might
be able to help out with this problem?


-- 
Mike A. Harris                  Shipping/mailing address:
OS Systems Engineer             190 Pittsburgh Ave., Sault Ste. Marie,
XFree86 maintainer              Ontario, Canada, P6C 5B3
Red Hat Inc.
http://www.redhat.com           ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris

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