X.Org Server Finally Adapted To Better Deal With 16:9 & 16:10 Displays
While 16:9 has been the most common aspect ratios for TVs and monitors for about the past decade and 16:10 ratio displays were popular in the early 2000's, the X.Org Server is finally being adapted in moving past the time of being focused on supporting 4:3 aspect ratio CRT monitors.
Thanks to SUSE's Martin Wilck finally taking the initiative, standard/common 16:9 and 16:10 modes has been added to X.Org's extramodes configuration from 640 x 360 to 3840 x 2160 and beyond -- up to 15360 x 8640 modes for 16:9 and 2560x1600 on the 16:10 side. Extramodes is a static list of modes to consider as part of the default modes for the X11 Server.
Assuming your display doesn't have bugged EDID information, your Linux graphics driver would have normally set the correct native mode for the display -- including 16:9 and 16:10 ratios -- but when listing available resolutions via xrandr or other utilities relying on xf86GetDefaultModes() you may have not seen other available 16:9 and 16:10 modes. There's this bug report as an example from 2011 about not all 16:10 modes being exposed that could be found if using the same hardware on Windows.
Some of the X.Org DDX drivers have added their own widescreen monitor lists (some of them rather recently) as well as other proposed additions but now in 2018 there's finally this patch landing that was generated by the cvt utility for generating the modes.
This patch will be present in X.Org Server 1.20 that is currently running behind on its release but will hopefully be here in H1'2018.
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