Name
Xvesa - VESA Bios Extensions tiny X server
Synopsis
Xvesa [:display] [option...]
Description
Xvesa is a generic X server for Linux on the x86 platform. Xvesa does not know about any particular hardware, and sets its video mode by running the video BIOS in VM86 mode. Xvesa can use either standard VGA BIOS modes or any of the modes advertised by a VESA BIOS, if and where available.
Xvesa runs untrusted code with full privileges, and is therefore a fairly insecure X server. The Xvesa server should only be in trusted environments.
Options
Besides, the normal TinyX server's options (see TinyX(1)), Xvesa accepts the following command line options:
- -mode n
- specifies the VESA video mode to use. This option overrides any -screen options.
- -listmodes
- this lists all supported video modes. If -force was specified before -listmodes, this option will list all the modes that your BIOS supports, even if they will not be able to be used by the Xvesa server.
- -force
- this disables some sanity checks and uses the specified mode.
- -shadow
- this uses a shadow framebuffer and may dramatically improve performance on some hardware.
- -nolinear
- this uses a linear framebuffer when one is available/ even if one is available.
- -swaprgb
- this passes the RGB values so that it that works on broken BIOSes. Use this if the colors are wrong in PseudoColor and 16 color modes.
- -map-holes
- this uses a contiguous (hole-less) memory map and fixes a segmentation violation which while rare BIOSes violates the VESA specification. This may cause slightly higher memory usage on systems that overcommit memory.
- -verbose
- this emits diagnostic messages during BIOS initialization and teardown.
Keyboard
Multiple key presses recognized directly by Xvesa are:
- Ctrl+Alt+Backspace
- Immediately kill the server.
- Ctrl+Alt+F1...F12
- Switch to virtual console 1 through 12.
See Also
X(7), Xserver(1), TinyX(1), xdm(1), xinit(1).
Authors
The VESA driver was written by Juliusz Chroboczek. Keith Packard added support for standard VGA BIOS modes and who is especially proud of the 320x200 16 color mode.