f8t1 LiveCD " vga=..." boot loader parameter

Nelson Strother xunilarodef at gmail.com
Wed Sep 5 12:52:34 UTC 2007


  Please help me understand if we have a bug, or a design change (if so,
where is the documentation?).

  The f8t1 LiveCD responds to an attempt to use the boot loader parameter
vga=0x799 (via using the [TAB] key on the initial boot choice screen
to edit the "Run from image" entry to add this parameter to the end of
the:

  vmlinuz initrd=initrd.img  ro quiet
root=CDLABEL=Fedora-8-Test-1-Live-i686 rootfstype=iso9660 liveimg

line) with:
- - -
Undefined video mode number 799
Press <ENTER> to see video modes available, <SPACE> to continue, or wait 30 sec
[<ENTER> displays something similar to: ]
Mode:   COLS x ROWS
0 0F00   80 x 25 VGA
1 0F01   80 x 50 VGA
2 0F02   80 x 43 VGA
3 0F03   80 x 28 VGA
4 0F05   80 x 30 VGA
5 0F06   80 x 39 VGA
6 0F07   80 x 60 VGA
[... selecting a choice to scan for additional modes merely made the
 screen flash for a couple of minutes, but no additional choices were
 displayed]
- - -

  Selecting one of the scrunched modes (e.g. 6) does pack more
characters on the screen ... for a while;  but by the time the boot
messages were into the "SELinux ..." group, just before the
"Interactive Startup" message, this VGA choice had evaporated
and the usual smaller number of characters were being displayed
on the screen

  I appreciate the feedback, as that is better than the silent
failures to change video modes I have witnessed with other recent
Fedora media.  But the choice of modes shown is quite different
from those shown on e.g.:
    http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora7/FAQ#head-1d333d02c2c2e2f3b06d18ce92d41dcbba823d59
and other places VESA video modes (or VGA codes) are documented.

  Bugzilla time?  Or do others with different hardware find more
constructive behavior from attempts to use this boot loader parameter
vga=... ?

Cheers,
Nelson

p.s. After installing the kernel-doc.noarch package, one can read in:
 /usr/share/doc/kernel-doc-2.6.22/Documentation/i386/boot.txt
  vga=<mode>
	<mode> here is either an integer (in C notation, either
	decimal, octal, or hexadecimal) or one of the strings
	"normal" (meaning 0xFFFF), "ext" (meaning 0xFFFE) or "ask"
	(meaning 0xFFFD).  This value should be entered into the
	vid_mode field, as it is used by the kernel before the command
	line is parsed.




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