Framebuffer with gfxpayload=1024x768x16 results in white screen on PCI S3 card

[Arie Skliarouk]

Binary package hint: grub2

Framebuffer with default gfxpayload=1024x768x16 results in white screen on an old PCI "S3 Inc. 86c775/86c785 [Trio 64V2/DX or /GX] (rev 06)" video card.

The dmesg had following lines:
Jun 5 07:42:20 mf kernel: [ 7.967371] Console: switching to colour frame buffer device 80x30
Jun 5 07:42:20 mf kernel: [ 7.979176] fb0: S3 Trio64V2/DX on 0000:04:00.0, 1 MB RAM, 60 MHz MCLK
Jun 5 07:42:20 mf kernel: [ 8.001207] fb0: not enough framebuffer memory (1200 kB requested , 1024 kB available)

I had to use gfxpayload=640x480x32 to get normal 80x24 resolution with the following lines in the dmesg:
Jun 5 08:51:24 mf kernel: [ 1.683731] efifb: framebuffer at 0xa6d60, mapped to 0xffff8800000a6d60, using 56k, total 64k
Jun 5 08:51:24 mf kernel: [ 1.683734] efifb: mode is 640x350x1, linelength=80, pages=1
Jun 5 08:51:24 mf kernel: [ 1.683735] efifb: scrolling: redraw
Jun 5 08:51:24 mf kernel: [ 1.683738] efifb: Truecolor: size=8:8:8:8, shift=24:16:8:0
Jun 5 08:51:24 mf kernel: [ 1.685028] Console: switching to colour frame buffer device 80x43
Jun 5 08:51:24 mf kernel: [ 1.686260] fb0: EFI VGA frame buffer device

IMHO in case failures the framebuffer code should automatically fallback to lower resolution/color depth mode.

The distribution is ubuntu 11.04, kernel 2.6.38-8-server amd64.

# dpkg -l | grep grub
ii grub-common 1.99~rc1-13ubuntu3 GRand Unified Bootloader, version 2 (common files)
ii grub-gfxpayload-lists 0.2 GRUB gfxpayload blacklist
ii grub-pc 1.99~rc1-13ubuntu3 GRand Unified Bootloader, version 2 (PC/BIOS version)

[Marcus Tomlinson (marcustomlinson)]

This release of Ubuntu is no longer receiving maintenance updates. If this is still an issue on a maintained version of Ubuntu please let us know.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for grub2 (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]