Kernel Mode-Setting on Intel hardware

Today I was going to try kernel modesetting, or kms in short, on my machines with intel graphic chipsets. First I was going to try it on was my 'old' laptop with an intel 915 chipset. I configured a 2.6.29-rc1 kernel and tried it, but as soon as it wanted to change mode my screen would turn black and only show something as soon as X was started again. One time it did seem to have working consoles again after X was started, but that didn't seem reproducible.

I decided to move to the next victim, my MSI Wind with intel 945 chipset. I was hoping a newer chipset would work better, so I took the same route again and rebooted, and it worked! The only thing that didn't work was X, but I knew I had to get something near version 2.6 of the intel Xorg driver to have that working with kms again.

So while I installed new drivers I went looking for the differences between the kernel configurations of both machines. I started at the framebuffer section, because I knew I had the uvesafb driver compiled in on my 'old' laptop and I had intelfb compiled in on both laptops, so my first guess was to disable the uvesafb driver and try what happens. Immediate success, I had native 1680x1050 on the console on my 'old' laptop, and X would even start. I didn't have recent intel Xorg drivers however, so switching between X and consoles was still as slows as it had always been. But having the consoles at native resolution is already so much of an improvement, that you shouldn't really care.

Meanwhile, my MSI Wind had finished installing newer intel Xorg drivers and I was ready to start X, success again. Switching between X and consoles is simply amazingly fast. I have however noticed a small issue here, somehow gdm thinks the vertical resolution is about twice what it really is, so I only see the top half of the screen and thus no login box. Once I'm logged in the issue seems to persist and my cursor is invisible, but my terminal keyboard shortcut works and the terminal is completely visible, so I can live with that for now.

Next machine is my Asus EEEpc 701/4G surf, which features an intel 915 chipset again. I compiled a 2.6.29-rc1 kernel again, using the config I made last week when I created my bootable usb stick. Copied the kernel to my usb stick, booted and... failure. Same kind of problem as on my 'old' laptop, screen turns black. Because I use the gentoo minimal image I never get to a X server either, so it stays black. Back to the kernel config, what went wrong? Somehow console framebuffer support was turned off, and I also had some other options turned off like low level display driver support. I don't think the latter really matters, but the first was an issue. After that it booted fine, except for the fact that I now used the in-kernel squashfs support which was at version 4.0 already, while the patch I previously used to patch my kernel sources was at version 3.4. Seems like the disk-format changed in between, so I can't mount the image, but I can get the fancy native resolution console.

Everything seems to work now, except for one thing, my 'old' laptop refuses to start X after updating to one of the 2.6 beta intel graphic drivers. Seems to get a hard lock, so I'll have to dig into that. I might have some newer packages installed on my msi wind, so I'll start by comparing versions and then I'll see. So far I'm happy.

Other issues I noticed are that on all the machines I seem to get some output from the drm driver that something is going wrong, including occasional call traces where something apparently went terribly wrong, but almost everything works. I also noticed that after a while the screen blanks, even though I think it shouldn't. Even worse, pressing a key won't turn it back on again, but switching to console, pressing a key does. After that I can switch back to X again and it works.

So now I only have one thing left to do, and that's check if it also works on the MacBook me and my girlfriend use together, but I guess I'll have to do some more work on my bootable usb stick before that's going to work.