SuperVESAfb Driver

[mdwatts]

SuperVESAfb is a FrameBuffer driver for Linux boxes. It's intended to work with nearly all VESA 2.0-compliant graphic cards. It's based in the VESAFB driver from the kernel, but this allows to change the graphic mode 'in-the-fly', and even have each console with its own resolution and/or color depth.

The driver uses a little daemon, which calls the BIOS functions using the V86 mode. This daemon uses the LRMI library.

http://www.rastersoft.com/supervesafb_en.html

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vesa supervesa framebuffer console resolution change

[hard candy]

Will this framebuffer driver allow XF86 to change the resolution without restarting Xserver? I have one enabled in my Gentoo distro but I still have to restart X whenever I make a change to XF86XConfig. I saw one about a VB driver for the Intel graphics driver Intel 810 (http://i810fb.sourceforge.net/) that seems to support changing modes without rebooting but I use AMD and a nVidia card. Or is he talking about just the bios driver and not the X server?

[mdwatts]

I haven't tried it myself though I believe it's only for console mode.

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by hard candy
Will this framebuffer driver allow XF86 to change the resolution without restarting Xserver? Ctrl-Alt-KeypadPlus and Ctrl-Alt-KeypadMinus do that now. If that's not quite the behavior you want, then look at the xrandr program that's distributed with XFree86 4.3.0 (it doesn't come with older versions, so you may have to upgrade X).

I have an nVidia card too, and both of these solutions work. You just need to define all the modes you'll ever need in your XF86Config first, then you don't have to worry about what happens when you edit it. Then use xrandr to switch between them.

[hard candy]

That is so neat! Thanks. "xrandr"-it should go in the list of useful programs.