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Kernel 5.10.78 with legacy framebuffers

November 10, 2021 — BarryK

I am having success with fixing Firefox, will post about that later. For now want to document a little experiment; the linux kernel configured to use efifb and vesafb.

I posted about fixing broken video here:

https://easyos.org/user/how-to-fix-broken-video.html

...at the bottom of the page, explained that the kernel configuration has been set to use "simple" framebuffer instead of the so-called legacy efifb and vesafb.

There are conflicting reports about whether CONFIG_FB_SIMPLE is a good thing or a bad thing. CONFIG_FB_SIMPLE page:

https://cateee.net/lkddb/web-lkddb/FB_SIMPLE.html

CONFIG_X86_SYSFB page:

https://cateee.net/lkddb/web-lkddb/X86_SYSFB.html

What I experimented with, is to disable both of these. Like this:

Bus options
[ ] Mark VGA/VBE/EFI FB as generic system framebuffer (CONFIG_X86_SYSFB)

Device drivers -> Graphics support -> Frame buffer devices
-> Support for frame buffer devices
[ ] Simple framebuffer support (CONFIG_FB_SIMPLE)

I tested on a couple of PCs, including the one with troublesome Nvidia card, no noticeable difference.

There's nothing to convince me to change from using simplefb.     

Tags: easy