Framebuffer and Xen

I’m currently using Xen as my virtualization software of choice, and it works pretty well. I’m currently using it on my laptop, my workstation and on my IA64 server.

On my workstation and my IA64 server, not having framebuffer support together with Xen is tolerable, given that I never use anything but X on my workstation and I don’t have any console attached to my IA64 server; it’s remote SSH access only.

My laptop is a completely different story though. I mainly use my laptop when I’m out and I tend to not start X because I don’t have much use of it, so it would be really nice to have working framebuffer there.

Anyway, I’m not a fan of long posts. Here is my solution to get a working framebuffer with Xen:

title Gentoo Linux
root (hd0,0)
kernel /xen.gz vga=gfx-1024x768x32
module /kernel-2.6.21-dom0-selinux root=/dev/sda2 vga=0x317 selinux=1

Notice the vga statement on the kernel-line.

The vga statement on the module-line is probably redundant, but I haven’t removed it yet to verify.