I think I have already read about this issue but I just want to confirm.
I’m using a TV at the moment with Haiku as I don’t have a monitor available.
I have noticed that the image is either stretched if I select 16:9 in the tv or it displays in 4:3 or the image spills out of the screen if I change the resolution in Haiku.
If I am not mistaken this is due to the BIOS and VESA not having any HD resolutions (Bios always displays 4:3). So this behaviour is normal and can’t be changed as Haiku is not using the integrated graphics. Right?
Same with sound over HDMI. Not supported even with channel remapping at this stage. Correct?
I just want to double check before I go trying to change things and messing up with settings.
It’s correct that HDMI sound is currently not supported at all.
What resolutions you can select depends on what’s supported by your VESA BIOS.
If the correct resolution isn’t available,you can try enabling VESA BIOS patching to add your resolution on boot.
To try it,add or uncomment bios patching true to the file home/config/settings/kernel/drivers/vesa
You also need to add/uncomment a resolution that works for you with the mode line,that’s explained here: https://cgit.haiku-os.org/haiku/commit/?id=9fec431f60eb26d05a0b91c9f15dc91f4cbd3af1
Note however that VESA BIOS patching isn’t supported on all hardware,and if your hardware doesn’t support it,it may crash and give you a black screen.
Additionally,most TVs allow you to choose how they handle non-fitting input.
Most allow you to either stretch the image,or put black bars left and right beside it or zoom it and make an area on the top and bottom invisible.
I followed the intructions. However, I save the line bios_patching true (in the page you linked it had an underscore, but you wrote without it. I tried with _ ), I check that the line is in there but when I reboot the line dissapears and vesa goes back to its default.
I do think my issue has to do with how old this computer is and the fact that widescreen was not common at that time.
Yes my TV can stretch (but that looks terrible), zoom in, but then the screen becomes weird as things just don’t fit properly, or add bars, which is what it has been doing and my preferred mode if the integrated video can’t resolve the correct aspect ratio.
It is not a big issue, I was just wondering as Win and Linux are able to achieve the correct aspect ratio and resolution.
I got a couple of kernel panic messages today after I was playing with this, not sure if they are related.
I was able to resolve it once by rebooting and once by entering safe mode and then rebooting.
bios_patching with _ is correct,that was my mistake.
Normally the line shouldn’t magically disappear.
Did you also add a mode line that tells the system which custom resolution to add?
With the kernel panic I can’t help unfortunately as I’m not a kernel developer and I can’t guess a cause of it.
There is no root on Haiku,there’s a single user with all privileges,so that’s not the issue.
You’ve done everything correctly.
One idea that I have is that Haiku automatically reverts the changes when it detects that your hardware doesn’t support VESA BIOS patching (but that may be nonsense,just a wild guess)
Let’s wait until someone with better kernel knowledge reads this
I’m not sure that on Haiku retrieving EDID over HDMI is always working. It could help if device is already on (I mean not in stand by mode) You could also check what EDID says on other systems. It would give you an idea of natively supported modes of your TV.
Note that if you’re using UEFI, the resolution is set up at boot and you can’t change it after. So, you have to select the correct framebuffer resolution in the boot loader.
TV is on and already had to pass grub. So Haiku isn’t waking it up.
This computer doesn’t have UEFI mode. Only BIOS (2007) so right in between the changeover, but I assume no UEFI because BIOS is too simple and doesn’t offer legacy mode. It doesn’t offer any sort of resolutions of anything either.
The other only computer that I have near the TV doesn’t have HDMI, only mini DP which this computer doesn’t have.
As I said. It’s not a big issue. I’ll test more once I have a proper monitor that I can hook it up to.
I know they are all totally unrelated. But the other two OSs seem to be able to make it work, so they must be identifying the device in a different way.
There is 1920x1080 available in Haiku but if I select it the screen keeps the 4:3 (actually 5:4) aspect ratio with black bars on each side of the image, but then it moves part of the desktop to the outside of the viewable area, to the right.
So I can still see the icons but the deskbar can’t be seen. So part of the active screen is out of bound.
It seems you are using the Intel GMA driver here, and maybe it doesn’t know how to set the resolution on this generation of hardware (Intel likes to change how this works in every generation of card, unfortunately for us).
So, you may try to enable failsafe video mode in the boot menu or in the kernel settings, and see if that works better for changing resolutions. The BIOS patching will not help if you are not using the VESA/failsafe video driver.
It looks like the settings file is overwritten when changing video modes using the screen preferences. That may explain why the bios_patching setting disappears.
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