[Openchrome-users] Trying to get Openchrome (update) working on HP2133 and openSUSE Tumbleweed

[Kevin Brace]

Hi Keith,

> Sent: Sunday, May 28, 2017 at 6:17 PM
> From: "Keith Mitchell" <keith at smoti.org>
> To: "Kevin Brace" <kevinbrace at gmx.com>, openchrome-users at lists.freedesktop.org
> Subject: Re: [Openchrome-users] Trying to get Openchrome (update) working on HP2133 and openSUSE Tumbleweed
>
> Hi Kevin,
> 
> Thank you for your prompt response.
> 
> Cool, just put a $100 240Gb SSD in mine for this :-)
> 
> This appears to have nailed it, thanks ! Had to try a few things as
> vesafb is compiled in to the SuSE kernels, not a module, but eventually
> all of:
> 
> 	video=vesafb:off vga=normal nomodeset
> 
> as kernel parameters in grub.cfg did the job of disabling vesafb and
> letting X start up.
> 

Okay, I am glad the workaround worked.


> Well, there goes my holiday weekend, but meantime I'm pleased to report
> I also got a working X using your DRM code. I cloned the drm-openchrome
> tree from github, and just (slowly !) built a 3.19 kernel which pulls in
> that code to fill in the missing via.ko module. It appears to work so
> far, though I have not exercised it hard. Going to stick with the stock
> SUSE kernel for stability and see how it goes..
> 

Yeah, the newer OpenChrome DRM suffers from having an issue with a frame buffer memory allocation.
This problem strikes when you try to change the screen resolution.
I probably should not blame the previous developer who worked on the code, but he did not care to test this functionality for the newer OpenChrome DRM or the existing OpenChrome DDX.
At least for the OpenChrome DDX, I was able to fix it in Version 0.5.
I did spend considerable time on it trying to figure out what is causing the crash, and the above explanation is the best answer I have come up with, but due to the way the code is written, I do not really have an idea at this point as to how I am going to fix the bug.
I am planning to do an eventual major rewrite hoping to fix the issue at that point.


> > Dual head works right now since I test it all the time.
> 
> Awesome - I have indeed now got it driving an 1920x1080 VGA external
> monitor.
> 
> Keith
> 

Regards,

Kevin Brace
The OpenChrome Project maintainer / developer