[Bug 250826] x11/xorg incorrect autogenerated xorg.conf

bugzilla-noreply at freebsd.org bugzilla-noreply at freebsd.org
Wed Nov 4 01:32:42 UTC 2020


https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=250826

--- Comment #4 from Bill Blake <billblake2018 at gmail.com> ---
Loading i915kms into my kernel suffices to make X start and for X to get input
from my keyboard.  I can use either the one from GENERIC or the one compiled
from ports.

BUT.

1)  This bug report is about the auto-generated xorg.conf.  X should have
detected the fact that I didn't have i915kms and not generated an xorg.conf
that relied on it.  I was able to tweak the auto-generated xorg.conf to make it
work without i915kms, so X should have been able to do the same.  Alternately,
in 5.4.4 and 5.4.8 of the Handbook, where it says one should not create a
config unless X autoconfig fails, it should suggest loading i915kms (or another
driver) before creating a config.

2) Using i915kms merely creates new problems for me.

First, a buglet: I happened to leave /etc/ttys as-is when I ran the GENERIC
kernel and my normal /etc/ttys has a login on every tty that GENERIC allows,
meaning that there were none for X.  X should have complained and died. 
Instead, it took ttyv0 for itself, leading to amusing behavior as it contended
with the shell for keyboard input.

And an annoyance: I use ctwm as my window manager and I bound ALT + Page Down
and ALT + the arrow keys to various functions.  While my other ALT bindings
(using letters) work fine, those ALT bindings do not work at all.  Presumably,
X is sending different keys to ctwm when I'm using i915kms than it does when
I'm not. I'm not thrilled by the idea of trying to track down what it is
actually getting. 

And a deal-breaker: I am visually impaired and I have a nice big screen so that
I can see what I'm doing.  At some point in the past, the vt driver decided to
make the screen 100x37 instead of 80x25.  That was a pain, but I can still read
it.  However, when I use i915kms, that 100x37 goes to 160x50 and I really can't
read that without further damaging my back (because I have to lean way forward
to read the screen).  There is no obvious way to change the screen size;
vidcontrol doesn't seem to allow it.  (vidcontrol -i mode shows no modes;
trying to change the size gets "Inappropriate ioctl for device".)  Since I use
the text screens extensively, this alone makes i915kms useless for me.

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