Plymouth on ATI and nVidia

[Christopher A. Williams]

On Wed, 2008-10-29 at 18:34 +0200, Aioanei Rares wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 6:28 PM, Rahul Sundaram
> <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>         Christopher A. Williams wrote:
>                 On Wed, 2008-10-29 at 14:52 +0000, "Jóhann B.
>                 Guðmundsson" wrote:
>                         First of all
>                         Nvidia does not work and so far and there is
>                         nothing that indicates it will work in the
>                         near future.
>                 
>                 Truly a bummer! Given the large number of nVidia card
>                 users there are, I
>                 would think this should be more of a priority. Please
>                 don't let this
>                 turn into a philosophical discussion (aka a flame
>                 fest) on nVidia vs.
>                 others. A lot of people use nVidia cards - we need to
>                 deal with that and
>                 respond to the end user population accordingly...
>         
>         
>         Not philosophical. Just a matter of not having the source code
>         to fix the proprietary drivers. However the reverse
>         engineering effort can yield some results albeit in a delayed
>         manner. Refer 
>         
>         
>         http://fedoramagazine.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/interview-fedora-10s-better-startup/

<snip...>
> 
> If I append "vga=0x318" to my kernel options in menu.lst for example,
> i can see the nice plymouth effects (GeForce 8500 GTS) So would it
> hurt if we would add this option as the default in grub as a
> (temporary) workaround? Are there cards that don't scale well with
> "vga=0x318" ?

Interesting... I just tried appending "vga=0x318" to my kernel options.
It didn't work outright, but...

...It DID error out and give me a list of scanned VGA options. I
selected one of them at random (vga=0x323) and "Graphical Plymouth" came
to life in all its glory.

Given the other feedback, this seems to also work for nVidia cards.

So, why COULDN't we  have Plymouth (or a set of appropriate kernel
options) do something like:
1) scan for an appropriate and usable VESA mode for these cards
2) Upon discovering there's a really nice one we can use, go with that
one
3) Then fail back to text mode only after nothing available in a
reasonable VESA mode works.

Solves the problem from what I can tell...

Cheers,

Chris