[Question] vesa driver with RandR 1.2

[Jerome Glisse]

On Sat, 2009-04-11 at 16:22 +0900, Kan-I Jyo wrote:
> 2009/4/10 Alex Deucher <alexdeucher at gmail.com>:
> > On 4/10/09, Kan-I Jyo <cecilhsujp at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Dear list,
> >>
> >>  I am currently using xserver-xorg-video-vesa 1.3.0 along with
> >>  xrandr 1.2 on one of my laptop.
> >>
> >>  It is to my curiosity that is there any support on RandR in vesa
> >>  driver since it seems to fail detecting an external monitor.
> >>
> >>  I have taken a look on the git tree of vesa driver and it seems
> >>  that support for RandR 1.2 is on the TODO list.
> >>
> >>  http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-vesa/tree/src/vesa.c
> >>
> >>  <vesa.c>
> >>  ... snip ...
> >>  /*
> >>   * TODO:
> >>   * - PanelID might give us useful size hints.
> >>   * - Port to RANDR 1.2 setup to make mode selection slightly better
> >>   * - Port to RANDR 1.2 to drop the old-school DGA junk
> >>   * - VBE/SCI for secondary DDC method?
> >>   */
> >>  ... snip ...
> >>
> >>
> >>  Is there any means to use the external monitor with vesa driver?
> >
> > If you boot with your laptop lid closed, you can probably get the
> > external display to work with vesa.  Multi-head is not really possible
> > with vesa.   If you want multi-head or the ability to switch outputs,
> > use a native driver for your hardware.
> >
> > Alex
> >
> 
> Dear Alex,
> 
> Thank you for your prompt reply.
> 
> It is to my surprise that the vesa driver does not support multi-head
> display currently ( I assumed that it does). Is this going to be
> implemented or using a native driver is the only means?
> 

VESA standard is more than 10 years old, back in the day dual monitor
only existed on expensive workstation and they definitly weren't using
vesa to drive things. So no it won't ever happen with vesa and you
will need native driver, anyway native driver (at least for the most
common gpu manufacturer) are way faster than vesa.

Cheers,
Jerome Glisse