AndrewAPrice wrote:
I use Grub and it works great. It passes the framebuffer, resolution and other metadata to the kernel via the multiboot header.
Grub still generally relies on mechanisms like VBE or GOP (or UGA, or OpenFirmware...) to obtain that framebuffer, so it can still suffer from the common issue of not being able to set up a native panel resolution when VBE/GOP don't have one - a bizarre curse of early boot on many laptops where you would think the
one known panel resolution would have been included! My ThinkPad T410 has a native resolution of 1440x900, yet the VBE firmware only supports 1280x800!
Grub does have a
few specialized drivers - such as one for the Cirrus chipset QEMU used to default to emulating, one for the Bochs BGA (looks like only port-IO versions), ones for some Radeon cards used in Lemote machines...