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Added new article from ~1 week ago.
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Michael Trausch
Michael Trausch
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Frame buffers are nothing more than memory regions that are used for graphics.

Modern graphics cards have kernel-native drivers which are used for KMS (kernel mode setting) and can use very high-resolution and high-speed framebuffers even on dual heads.

However, the card emulated by QEMU there does not have such a driver. You’d have to be emulating one of the major supported chipsets in order to get such a thing; otherwise, all you get is the old-style VESA framebuffer, which is very slow though still higher-resolution than 80x25 VGA text mode.

See Wikipedia’s “Framebuffer” article for more information than you’d really ever want or need on them. Also, see this article from Phoronix on KMS with QEMU, but I don’t know what the current status of it is and it appears to depend on QEMU-KVM and not stock QEMU itself.

ETA: Here is another article from Phoronix, from May 2, 2012, on KMS and QEMU. It looks like it is slated to be merged into Linux 3.5, but if you want to use it for now you will have to download, patch and build your own kernel.

Frame buffers are nothing more than memory regions that are used for graphics.

Modern graphics cards have kernel-native drivers which are used for KMS (kernel mode setting) and can use very high-resolution and high-speed framebuffers even on dual heads.

However, the card emulated by QEMU there does not have such a driver. You’d have to be emulating one of the major supported chipsets in order to get such a thing; otherwise, all you get is the old-style VESA framebuffer, which is very slow though still higher-resolution than 80x25 VGA text mode.

See Wikipedia’s “Framebuffer” article for more information than you’d really ever want or need on them. Also, see this article from Phoronix on KMS with QEMU, but I don’t know what the current status of it is and it appears to depend on QEMU-KVM and not stock QEMU itself.

Frame buffers are nothing more than memory regions that are used for graphics.

Modern graphics cards have kernel-native drivers which are used for KMS (kernel mode setting) and can use very high-resolution and high-speed framebuffers even on dual heads.

However, the card emulated by QEMU there does not have such a driver. You’d have to be emulating one of the major supported chipsets in order to get such a thing; otherwise, all you get is the old-style VESA framebuffer, which is very slow though still higher-resolution than 80x25 VGA text mode.

See Wikipedia’s “Framebuffer” article for more information than you’d really ever want or need on them. Also, see this article from Phoronix on KMS with QEMU, but I don’t know what the current status of it is and it appears to depend on QEMU-KVM and not stock QEMU itself.

ETA: Here is another article from Phoronix, from May 2, 2012, on KMS and QEMU. It looks like it is slated to be merged into Linux 3.5, but if you want to use it for now you will have to download, patch and build your own kernel.

Source Link
Michael Trausch
Michael Trausch
  • 436
  • 3
  • 10

Frame buffers are nothing more than memory regions that are used for graphics.

Modern graphics cards have kernel-native drivers which are used for KMS (kernel mode setting) and can use very high-resolution and high-speed framebuffers even on dual heads.

However, the card emulated by QEMU there does not have such a driver. You’d have to be emulating one of the major supported chipsets in order to get such a thing; otherwise, all you get is the old-style VESA framebuffer, which is very slow though still higher-resolution than 80x25 VGA text mode.

See Wikipedia’s “Framebuffer” article for more information than you’d really ever want or need on them. Also, see this article from Phoronix on KMS with QEMU, but I don’t know what the current status of it is and it appears to depend on QEMU-KVM and not stock QEMU itself.