Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

Tue 14th May, 2013

Modern kernels and uncooperative monitors

Our main TV screen is a Kogan 32" TV hooked up to a Mini-ITX machine running a MythTV frontend on Fedora 18. Due to Kogan buying the cheapest monitors, which are the ones with the worst firmware, it has several annoyingly braindead features that make it hard to use with a computer:

Now, not having an EDID used not to be a problem when X did most of the heavy work of setting up the display, because you could, at a pinch, tell it to trust you on what modes the monitor could support. With a program like cvt you could generate a modeline that you'd stick in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf and it'd output the right frequencies. This is what I had to do for Fedora 16.

The new paradigm now is that the kernel sets the monitor resolution and X is basically a client application to use it. This solves a lot of problems for most people, but unfortunately the kernel doesn't really handle the situation when the monitor doesn't actually respond with a valid EDID. More unfortunately, this actually happens in numerous situations - dodgy monitors and dodgy KVM switches being two obvious ones.

It turns out, however, that there is a workaround. You can tell the kernel that you have a (made-up) EDID block to load that it's going to pretend came from the monitor. To do this, you have to generate an EDID block - handily explained in the Kernel documentation - which requires grabbing the kernel source code and Making the files in the Documentation/EDID directory. Then put the required file, say 1920x1080.bin, in a new directory /lib/firmware/edid, and add the parameter "drm_kms_helper.edid_firmware=edid/1920x1080.bin" to your kernel boot line in GRUB, and away you go.

Well, nearly. Because the monitor literally does not respond, rather than responding with something useless, the kernel doesn't turn that display on (because, after all, not responding is also what the HDMI and DVI ports are also doing, because nothing is plugged into them). So you also have to tell the kernel that you really do have a monitor there, by also including the parameter "video=VGA-1:e" on the kernel boot line as well.

Once you've done that, you're good to go. Thank you to the people at OSADL for documenting this. Domestic harmony at PaulWay Central is now restored.

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