Comment 60 for bug 541492

On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 12:46:49PM -0000, jerrylamos wrote:
> If what "vesa" lacks is 16:9 resolution since I'm not a coder it would
> seem to me to be easier to add that than whatever development effort the
> "intel" driver is taking.

It's not so simple. All monitors are required to support certain
standard resolutions, so we can always just assume those resolutions
exist. These are the VESA resolutions (VESA is the name of the
standards body that specified them, and this was done well before
monitors started being HD, so they're all 4:3).

Outside this, monitor manufacturers are free to implement any other
additional resolutions, and the timings for those are stored in the
monitor itself in a blob of firmware data called EDID, which certain
video drivers can query to learn more about available resolutions.

Anyway -vesa does not have any of that probing stuff, it just hard codes
the VESA resolutions it knows will be there.

> With the amount of work and trouble KMS must have some value to someone.

It enables various functionalities to be done at a lower level closer to
the hardware. Some of the benefits of this are showing up now, such as
improving boot behavior. Other benefits that depend on KMS are in the
pipelines but won't show up for a while yet, like being able to run X as
a non-root user, or being able to have external monitors automatically
re-configure themselves when plugged in, and so on.