vesa(4)

vesa4

Generic vesa video driver

Usage

Section "Device"
  Identifier "devname"
  Driver "vesa"
  ...
EndSection

Overview

vesa is an Xorg driver for generic VESA video cards. It can drive most VESA-compatible video cards, but only makes use of the basic standard VESA core that is common to these cards. The driver supports depths 8, 15 16 and 24.

Supported hardware

The vesa driver supports most VESA-compatible video cards. There are some known exceptions, and those should be listed here.

Configuration details

Please refer to xorg.conf(5) for general configuration details. This section only covers configuration details specific to this driver.

The driver auto-detects the presence of VESA-compatible hardware. The ChipSet name may optionally be specified in the config file "Device" section, and will override the auto-detection:

"vesa"

The following driver Options are supported:

Option "ShadowFB" "boolean"

Enable or disable use of the shadow framebuffer layer. Default: on.

This option is recommended for performance reasons.

Option "ModeSetClearScreen" "boolean"

Clear the screen on mode set. Some BIOSes seem to be broken in the sense that the newly set video mode is bogus if they are asked to clear the screen during mode setting. If you experience problems try to turn this option off. Default: on.

Releases

12 releases since Debian 3.0 (Woody); the text changed 8 times.

  1. 3.0
  2. 4.0–5.0
  3. 6.0
  4. 7
  5. 8
  6. 9
  7. 10
  8. 11–12
  9. 13–Arch

Authors

Authors include: Paulo Ce´sar Pereira de Andrade.

From xf86-video-vesa 2.6.0-3 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's man source.