disable gma3150 on boot?

sharjes · n00b Joined: 23 Jul 2006 Posts: 15

Hi folks,

is there a possibility to disable a GMA3150 internal graphics unit upon boot?

I run a Gentoo server without graphics/monitor and the GMA3150 steals 1GB of memory and probably some power. So it would be interesting to have a grub boot option for example, where it could be disabled or sent to sleep forever?

any ideas?

Best

Gusar · Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2010 8:30 am Post subject:

How can it steal 1GB of memory? Check the bios, it surely has options to adjust shared memory for the graphic card. There might also be an option in there to turn it off.

sharjes · n00b Joined: 23 Jul 2006 Posts: 15

The board is a zotac nm10-dtx with intel atom D510. the bios recognizes 4gb and I read somewhere that the internal GPU (GMA3150) takes one GB for shared memory and thus I only see 3GB in 'top'. The bios does not allow this to be disabled, but there is an option, that this can be disabled when an external graphics card is installed....

Best

Gusar · Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2010 10:45 pm Post subject:

It takes 1GB without the ability to change it? Whoa! Are you really sure about that? Seems excessive and over-the-top to me.
Well, my Gigabyte H55 board takes 128MB at minimum and it isn't possible to deactivate the onboard graphics either, except if a dedicated card is installed. I don't get why this isn't settable. But I've read other H55 boards offer more flexibility in this area. So we both got kinda screwed in our choice of motherboard. My machine is a desktop though, and I do actually use the onboard graphics, so it's less big of a deal.

chithanh · Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2010 11:06 pm Post subject:

Many Atom systems only ship with 1 GB memory. Maybe it steals 1 GB address space.

Does it make a difference if you boot a 32 bit or 64 bit system?