Tridentfb¶
Tridentfb is a framebuffer driver for some Trident chip based cards.
The following list of chips is thought to be supported although not all aretested:
those from the TGUI series 9440/96XX and with Cyber in their namesthose from the Image series and with Cyber in their namesthose with Blade in their names (Blade3D,CyberBlade...)the newer CyberBladeXP family
All families are accelerated. Only PCI/AGP based cards are supported,none of the older Tridents.The driver supports 8, 16 and 32 bits per pixel depths.The TGUI family requires a line length to be power of 2 if accelerationis enabled. This means that range of possible resolutions and bpp islimited comparing to the range if acceleration is disabled (see listof parameters below).
Known bugs:
The driver randomly locks up on 3DImage975 chip with accelerationenabled. The same happens in X11 (Xorg).
The ramdac speeds require some more fine tuning. It is possible toswitch resolution which the chip does not support at some depths forolder chips.
How to use it?¶
When booting you can pass the video parameter:
video=tridentfb
The parameters for tridentfb are concatenated with a ‘:’ as in this example:
video=tridentfb:800x600-16@75,noaccel
The second level parameters that tridentfb understands are:
noaccel | turns off acceleration (when it doesn’t work for your card) |
fp | use flat panel related stuff |
crt | assume monitor is present instead of fp |
center | for flat panels and resolutions smaller than native size center theimage, otherwise use |
stretch | |
memsize | integer value in KB, use if your card’s memory size is misdetected.look at the driver output to see what it says when initializing. |
memdiff | integer value in KB, should be nonzero if your card reportsmore memory than it actually has. For instance mine is 192K less thandetection says in all three BIOS selectable situations 2M, 4M, 8M.Only use if your video memory is taken from main memory hence ofconfigurable size. Otherwise use memsize.If in some modes which barely fit the memory you see garbageat the bottom this might help by not letting change to that modeanymore. |
nativex | the width in pixels of the flat panel.If you know it (usually 1024800 or 1280) and it is not what the driver seems to detect use it. |
bpp | bits per pixel (8,16 or 32) |
mode | a mode name like800x600-8@75 as described inmodedb default video mode support |
Using insane values for the above parameters will probably result in drivermisbehaviour so take care(for instance memsize=12345678 or memdiff=23784 ornativex=93)
Contact:jani@astechnix.ro