peterchristy955
New member
I bought a Lafite 14" i5 notebook about a year ago, and have been very pleased with it. I needed something compact for travelling, and yet powerful enough for video editing, and it fits the bill perfectly.
However, I have one small problem. I don't run windows, only Linux. My preferred distro is Slackware 64-bit (stable and fast). During the initial boot phase, Slackware uses either a vesa (for non-uefi systems) or uefi frame buffer until the kernel has fully loaded and the kernel-mode-setting kicks in. Unfortunately there seems to be a bug in the BIOS somewhere, as the screen remains blank until KMS has started.
Trawling through the system logs, I find "efifb: invalid framebuffer address" near the start of the boot log.
Normally this would not be an issue, as the system skips over this and just blanks the screen until KMS starts. However, if doing a clean install, this prevents de-bugging if anything is wrong with the installer! When I originally installed Slackware, I had to do a lot of lateral thinking to get around this! With a new stable release imminent (I'm currently running the development version, Slackware64-current), I would like to do a clean install once it is released. At present the installer hangs during the initial boot phase, and I can't debug it as I can't see what is happening!
It looks as if there is a bug in the BIOS that is failing to provide a proper address for the efifb frame buffer. Is an update available, and if so where can I get it? The version I have at present is 1.07.02TPCS
TIA,
--
Pete
However, I have one small problem. I don't run windows, only Linux. My preferred distro is Slackware 64-bit (stable and fast). During the initial boot phase, Slackware uses either a vesa (for non-uefi systems) or uefi frame buffer until the kernel has fully loaded and the kernel-mode-setting kicks in. Unfortunately there seems to be a bug in the BIOS somewhere, as the screen remains blank until KMS has started.
Trawling through the system logs, I find "efifb: invalid framebuffer address" near the start of the boot log.
Normally this would not be an issue, as the system skips over this and just blanks the screen until KMS starts. However, if doing a clean install, this prevents de-bugging if anything is wrong with the installer! When I originally installed Slackware, I had to do a lot of lateral thinking to get around this! With a new stable release imminent (I'm currently running the development version, Slackware64-current), I would like to do a clean install once it is released. At present the installer hangs during the initial boot phase, and I can't debug it as I can't see what is happening!
It looks as if there is a bug in the BIOS that is failing to provide a proper address for the efifb frame buffer. Is an update available, and if so where can I get it? The version I have at present is 1.07.02TPCS
TIA,
--
Pete