klange wrote:
rdos wrote:
I think that if it is an Intel laptop, you will be out of luck. Several of those only support 4x3 resolutions both using VBE and EFI, even if you have a widescreen display. Not even the BIOS manufacturer will be able to fix this as Intel only want to support operating systems that have their own native Intel display drivers. Additionally, the 4x3 emulation they provide is horribly slow.
It's definitely a poor situation on older systems, though it's usually better on EFI - you're far more likely to get native panel resolutions out of GOP.
It's my impression that it is worst on newer systems and works better on older. Which seems to coincidence with Linux having native video drivers, and so Intel no longer feel they need to provide the native resolution of the display through VBE or EFI. They will typically support only 640x480, 800x600 and 1024x768.
klange wrote:
On some BIOS systems, you could patch the VGA BIOS to replace one of the available VBE modes with the native panel resolution and timings.
Luckily, Intel GPUs aren't too hard to write barebones modesetting drivers for, especially if you just want to get one specific display working.
Toaru has one just for my old ThinkPad, which has a 1440x900 panel but only offered up to 1280x800 from VBE (at least that's the right aspect ratio!)
That's an interesting approach. Does this only work for a very specific Intel GPU, or for a larger range of models?