Zaphod Support For The X.Org Mode-Setting Driver

Written by Michael Larabel in X.Org on 6 August 2015 at 10:08 AM EDT. 21 Comments
X.ORG
Dave Airlie recently implemented support for the Zaphod mode within the X.Org Server's xf86-video-modesetting driver.

The Zaphod mode support can be found within the other common DDX drivers (e.g. Radeon and Nouveau) and is an alternative way for configuring dual-head displays under Linux rather than using RandR or Xinerama. The Zaphod mode's way of handling dual-head setups is creating one X screen per head.


David Airlie posted a patch implementing Zaphod and the ZaphodHeads xorg.conf option for the mode-setting driver. The code is loosely based on the Zaphod mode support of the xf86-video-ati Radeon driver. It's just about 200 lines of code adding in this feature, which will make the dual-head setup feasible with this generic X.Org driver as long as the hardware is backed by a DRM/KMS kernel driver.

The delayed X.Org Server 1.18 still hasn't been branched yet so it's possible that this functionality could be merged into the in-server mode-setting driver in time for the next release.
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