Table of Contents

Name

i810 - Intel 8xx integrated graphics chipsets

Synopsis


Section "Device"
  Identifier "devname"
  Driver "i810"
  ...
EndSection

Description

i810 is an XFree86 driver for Intel integrated graphics chipsets. The driver supports depths 8, 15, 16 and 24. All visual types are supported in depth 8. For the i810/i815 other depths support the TrueColor and DirectColor visuals. For the 830M and later, only the TrueColor visual is supported for depths greater than 8. The driver supports hardware accelerated 3D via the Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI), but only in depth 16 for the i810/i815 and depths 16 and 24 for the 830M and later.

Supported Hardware

i810 supports the i810, i810-DC100, i810e, i815, 830M, 845G, 852GM, 855GM, and 865G chipsets.

Configuration Details

Please refer to XF86Config(5) for general configuration details. This section only covers configuration details specific to this driver.

The Intel 8xx family of integrated graphics chipsets has a unified memory architecture and uses system memory for video ram. For the i810 and i815 familiy of chipset, operating system support for allocating system memory for video use is required in order to use this driver. For the 830M and later, this is required in order for the driver to use more video ram than has been pre-allocated at boot time by the BIOS. This is usually achieved with an "agpgart" or "agp" kernel driver. Linux, and recent versions of FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD have such kernel drivers available.

By default 8 Megabytes of system memory are used for graphics. For the 830M and later, the default is 8 Megabytes when DRI is not enabled and 32 Megabytes with DRI is enabled. This amount may be changed with the VideoRam entry in the config file Device section. It may be set to any reasonable value up to 64MB for older chipsets or 128MB for newer chipets. It is advisable to check the XFree86 log file to check if any features have been disabled because of insufficient video memory. In particular, DRI support or tiling mode may be disabled with insufficient video memory. Either of these being disabled will reduce performance for 3D applications. Note however, that increasing this value too much will reduce the amount of system memory available for other applications.

The driver makes use of the video BIOS to program video modes for the 830M and later. This limits the video modes that can be used to those provided by the video BIOS, and to those that will fit into the amount of video memory that the video BIOS is aware of.

The following driver Options are supported

Option "NoAccel" "boolean"
Disable or enable acceleration. Default: acceleration is enabled.
Option "SWCursor" "boolean"
Disable or enable software cursor. Default: software cursor is disable and a hardware cursor is used for configurations where the hardware cursor is available.
Option "ColorKey" "integer"
This sets the default pixel value for the YUV video overlay key. Default: undefined.
Option "CacheLines" "integer"
This allows the user to change the amount of graphics memory used for 2D acceleration and video. Decreasing this amount leaves more for 3D textures. Increasing it can improve 2D performance at the expense of 3D performance. Default: depends on the resolution, depth, and available video memory. The driver attempts to allocate at least enough to hold two DVD-sized YUV buffers by default. The default used for a specific configuration can be found by examining the XFree86 log file.
Option "DRI" "boolean"
Disable or enable DRI support. Default: DRI is enabled for configurations where it is supported.

The following driver Options are supported for the i810 and i815 chipsets:

Option "DDC" "boolean"
Disable or enable DDC support. Default: enabled.
Option "Dac6Bit" "boolean"
Enable or disable 6-bits per RGB for 8-bit modes. Default: 8-bits per RGB for 8-bit modes.
Option "XvMCSurfaces" "integer"
This option enables XvMC. The integer parameter specifies the number of surfaces to use. Valid values are 6 and 7. Default: XvMC is disabled.

The following driver Options are supported for the 830M and later chipsets:

Option "VBERestore" "boolean"
Enable or disable the use of VBE save/restore for saving and restoring the initial text mode. This is disabled by default because it causes lockups on some platforms. However, there are some cases where it must enabled for the correct restoration of the initial video mode. If you are having a problem with that, try enabling this option. Default: Disabled.
Option "VideoKey" "integer"
This is the same as the "ColorKey" option described above. It is provided for compatibility with most other drivers.
Option "XVideo" "boolean"
Disable or enable XVideo support. Default: XVideo is enabled for configurations where it is supported.

See Also

XFree86(1) , XF86Config(5) , xf86config(1) , Xserver(1) , X(7)

Authors

Authors include: Keith Whitwell, and also Jonathan Bian, Matthew J Sottek, Jeff Hartmann, Mark Vojkovich, Alan Hourihane, H. J. Lu. 830M and 845G support reworked for XFree86 4.3 by David Dawes and Keith Whitwell. 852GM, 855GM, and 865G support added by David Dawes and Keith Whitwell.

Table of Contents