Two Video Cards in Console?

dsulli99 · 2012-05-20 00:02:37

Hi, I apologize if this may be kind of a dumb question; I have two video cards; an ATI and an NVIDIA card; My question is fairly basic; X11 aside, should I be able to plug both video cards in and get the 'console' to display by default out of both cards? Do I have to do anything special to setup the second card for console (i.e non-X)? I know the OS is detecting both cards because they show up in lspci. The second card (the card in question), also shows up in dmesg. I dont' care if the same video signal is displayed on the second monitor; I just want it to display *something*; I am currently not getting any signal out of it.

Dan Sullivan

ConnorBehan · 2012-05-20 22:45:20

The most promising way would be to get framebuffer consoles on both cards. For the secondary card, you will have to load a GPU specific driver that has kernel modesetting. For the primary card, you can either do this or load a generic one like uvesafb. Once you have /dev/fb0 and /dev/fb1 you can move consoles from the primary card to the secondary card using con2fb. I'm not sure if it's in an Arch package but its a C file that has been floating around the fbdev community: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions … ng-454625/

Arch Linux

#1 2012-05-20 00:02:37

Two Video Cards in Console?

#2 2012-05-20 22:45:20

Re: Two Video Cards in Console?

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