What Kind Of People Use X.Org's VESA Driver?

[Adarion]

Phoronix: What Kind Of People Use X.Org's VESA Driver?

Me.

a) Sometimes I have to use it on VIA GPUs cause it was the only working thing with the external VGA on the laptop for beamer presentations. (CLE266)

b) Some HW just doesn't work with the appropriate driver or you have to configure the hell outta it. So first comer is VESA.

c) the mentioned failsafe mode
Even with my fine working Radeons I keep a xf86-video-vesa around, just in case. I know VESA driver kinda sucks and lately it even failed on a CN700 telling me it would not support 24bpp and things like this which must've been some strange error. Normally it should support 800x600 on 8, 16, 24 bpp or also 640x480 and 1024x786.

I'm happy when I don't have to use it but I'm also happy that there is at least VESA so I will basically get a graphic image on the screen.

Also for people with poulso or other stuff from imgtec or XGIs and the like VESA might still be the only working solution.

[TmTFx]

s3 chrome 20

I have a machine with an S3 Chrome 25, until the latest drivers (released on 2009-10-30), I had to use vesa cause the driver worked only on ubuntu 8.10 and not on mandriva or later versions of ubuntu... now that the new release is out i can have a try again...

[Elv13]

I was one of these respondent (who checked VESA), it is mostly because I am "too" bleeding edge. When some SVN/GIT build break X, vesa normally still work. So I stick with vesa until a patch is commited. I never use vesa for extensive period of time, it's installed just in case, and those kind of happens quite often.

[Chewi]

A friend of mine has an old Notebook with this graphics chip: "ATI Technilogies Inc Radeon IGP 330M/340M/350M".

He has some real trouble getting that to work with the open source stack. The "xf86-video-radeon" is supposed to support it but he never really got to get it working.

That's why he is still using Vesa with ATI hardware.

One of my laptops has this chipset. It's horrible. I call it the disease because it cripples what is otherwise a fairly capable machine. Having said that, it works just fine with xf86-video-ati (there's no such thing as xf86-video-radeon). It's never been supported by fglrx though. One very important thing to remember, enable the HyperZ option by installing driconf (or do it manually). It MAJORLY boosts the 3D performance. This may be the default now but it wasn't for a long time.

[chrisr]

What do you mean "try"?

@chrisr

To test oss support you can buy the cheapest card too as it will never unleash the full potential. Even onboard would be enought to try.

Don't try, do! Or do not. There is no "try" .

The "cheapest" cards often have half the memory of the others. I trust that I can expect Linux to use a card's full 1024MB, if present. But I'm buying this card with the expectation that it will last me for a long while yet.

[frantaylor]

If the VMware guest tools fail to install in your virtual machine or you don't bother to install them, you will end up with the VESA driver on many distributions.

If you set up a server with a very old video card that you had sitting on your shelf, chances are it is unsupported and you will also be using the VESA driver.

Perhaps not so much any more, but there used to be off-brand video cards with oddball hardware that was not recognized properly. If you tried to run the native driver you would get strange color artifacts or just a blank screen. However the VESA driver will still work with these odd cards.

[frantaylor]

Server motherboard on-board video

Many server motherboards, Supermicro's AMD boards in particular, use the ATI ES1000 chipset which has no xorg driver. You will need the VESA driver if you go with the on-board video.

[bridgman]

The ES1000 should be supported by the radeon driver -- it's basically an RN50 spec'ed without 3D IIRC.

[superpenguin]

A very simple explanation

I have a more simple explanation : it's a survey ! you cant expect 100% of all answers to be accurate... People can click randomly, some of them just click randomly for fun, some just like to input some unrealistic stuff so they get the impression they are cooler than other people, some have no clue what video driver they are using, some have no clue what video hardware they have in their PC, some might even not know what a video driver is . 1% of error for each answer is realistic, it does not mean there is anything wrong with the survey itself (and btw, phoronix rox

Next time put "Xorg-P3ngu1n-turboHD-DVD" on the list and you will see, people will click on it !

[chithanh]

The last adventure of PowerVR in PC space, the Kyro series has no native driver which works with current kernel/X.org. A proprietary driver exists but it is no longer maintained. xf86-video-vesa is your only option.