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

[phoronix]

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

Yesterday we shared the first numbers from our 2009 Linux Graphics Survey that showed the open-source ATI driver is now more popular than ATI's official Catalyst driver. The full results from this survey that concluded last month will be published tomorrow, but in yesterday's graph that we showed there was also something else interesting: the X.Org VESA driver usage...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=Nzc3Nw

[Kano]

Maybe Intel means GMA 500 too, that's psb not intel.

[birdie]

I will tell you why

1) In rare situations NVIDIA releases hardware which is not supported nor by their binary drivers, neither by NV driver.

2) In rare situations you want to check out if the graphics glitch you've faced is caused by VENDOR_NAME drivers so you run generic VESA drivers.

However I'm still puzzled who might want to use vesa driver on a regular basis.

[cician]

Probably these are mostly servers accessed with vnc/ssh. In this case only advantage running a full-blown driver would be power management.
Or people enraged with crashing drivers

[atriqus]

Keep in mind this was a web poll. The validity of every entry is not guaranteed. I bet there were a few people that went "lol vesa" and picked that.

[kbios]

I sometimes use the VESA driver on my two GeForce GTX285 (2Gb each) because it is the only way to use their vram as swapspace without hanging the system (using the phram module). This way I can get up to 8 Gb of RAM on my M2N32-SLI Deluxe (4 Gb of system RAM and 4 of video RAM). But I think this is not so common.

[Kano]

Buying 2x2 gb extra ram would be smarter

[kbios]

Buying 2x2 gb extra ram would be smarter

Yes, but RAM sticks don't render X-Plane very well

[chrisr]

Maybe the VESA driver is preferable to fglrx?

IIRC, fglrx is targeted at distros which run older X servers. I know from personal experience that running fglrx against a modern X server (such as the one found in Fedora 10) is an agonising exercise in frustration and pain. And AFAIK, fglrx isn't compatible with Fedora 12's X server at all!

So if fglrx isn't an option, and the dedicated Open Source drivers don't support your hardware yet, then which driver is left to use?

But then again, the latest graphics card I'm buying is a HD4890 rather than a HD5xxxx precisely because I wouldn't want to end up running the VESA driver either...

[Kano]

Just that this card is not faster than any nvidia offering