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I am trying to have the tty (at boot) to display on a secondary monitor than what it currently starts on, or even better - to have multiple tty's running at once on different displays, as is described here (In section C3) after trying to work this out and running:

cat /proc/fb

and getting an output of

0 EFI VGA

I have to say that I have no ideas what to do, whatsoever.

Should I have different monitors as different framebuffers? Is that viable? Should I have it all as one framebuffer?

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  • Are you running the nvidia closed source driver, or nouveau? If the first, maybe try nouveau, it's closer to how the "usual" framebuffer drivers work. Commented Oct 31, 2016 at 8:46
  • I'm running the proprietary one, but need that one for better performance - video editing/games etc. Commented Oct 31, 2016 at 8:47
  • With nouveau , it just displays it on all monitors at once with the same thing. Even getting it like that with the nvidia driver would be great! Commented Oct 31, 2016 at 8:48
  • I want that too unix.stackexchange.com/questions/157044/… what happens when you boot from the Arch ISO? Commented Jan 14, 2019 at 1:59

1 Answer 1

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For Nouveau:

Judging from the Forcing modes section, and the drm_fb_helper.c source linked from there, it looks like you need to write a custom driver and override the drm_fb_helper_single_add_all_connectors with your own routine to get multiple framebuffers for different outputs.

Not easy to do if you are not a programmer.

(BTW, a framebuffer is a piece of memory that stores the pixels you see on your monitor(s). The /dev/fb device(s) expose that piece of memory to linux programs, and the modesetting part (also kernel modesetting, KMS) instructs the hardware to display that particular framebuffer with a particular resolution and frequencies.)

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  • Is there any way to add a monitor as a separate frabebuffer device with the nvidia driver? Commented Oct 31, 2016 at 9:02
  • No idea. AFAIK "twinview" etc. only works for X, and not on the fb level, but my working knowledge about the nvidia driver is really outdated. I'm not even sure if nvidia now exposes a /dev/fb device, it didn't back then when I used it. Commented Oct 31, 2016 at 9:07
  • Only the VGA one, from cat /proc/fb in the first post - I was hoping there was a way to add or change which one it was, without just changing the cables around, as that would be very inconvenient Commented Oct 31, 2016 at 9:08
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    It's possible that this is just the default VGA fb device, not the nvidia driver one. If that is correct, the fb device and the nvidia driver are totally unrelated, and you won't be able to use different outputs or other features of your graphics card that are not standard VGA. Commented Oct 31, 2016 at 17:40

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