[PATCH] DRM/Radeon: Set depth on low mem Radeon cards to 16 instead of 8.

[Dave Airlie]

On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 3:07 AM, Alex Deucher <alexdeucher at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 12:33 PM, Egbert Eich <eich at suse.de> wrote:
>> The Radeon driver reduces the framebuffer resolution to 8bpp if
>> a device with less than 32 Mb VRAM is found. This causes the
>> framebuffer to run in 8 bit paletted mode. For a text console this
>> is not an issue as 256 different colors is more than one gets
>> on a VGA text console.
>> It is done to give X more memory to work with since the console memory
>> is not freed but remains allocated while X is active.
>> Still, running the fbdev Xserver driver - which we do during installation
>> - will give applications an 8bit pseudo-color visual which doesn't look
>> too pretty.
>> We therefore limit the framebuffer bpp to 16 when memory is 24MB or lower
>> and to 8 only if 8MB or less VRAM is found.
>> This should be a reasonable compromise for us.
>> This patch will most likely not ever make it upstream.
>>
>> This works around ugly modes on crappy IPMI cards using ES1000.
>
> I don't have a strong opinion either way on this one.

Why would you use fbdev? package -modesetting at least if not the real ATI DDX.

Dave.