Bug#398948: i810fb not available at boot-time if compiled as a module
I've been investigating this issue on two notebooks that have i815 chipsets, with Ubuntu Edgy 6.10 (2.6.17-10).
The reason i810fb (and most other framebuffers) isn't available at boot-time when compiled as a module is that the framebuffer drivers have to call drivers/video/fbmem.c's fb_get_options() function, but when built as a module the code to make that call and parse the command-line isn't compiled in drivers/video/i810/i810_main.c:
#ifndef MODULE
static int __devinit i810fb_init(void)
{
char *option = NULL;
if (fb_get_options("i810fb", &option))
return -ENODEV;
i810fb_setup(option);
return pci_register_driver(&i810fb_driver);
}
#endif
I looked at the source for several other XXXXfb drivers and they all have the same structure.
So, the answer seems to be, if you need specific framebuffer support at boot-time you'll need to build the kernel with i810, intel_agp, agpgart, drm, i810 all configured to statically link using the kernel build tool:
make config
TJ.
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