I am trying to get RetroArch set up with KMS on my laptop, which is running Ubuntu 13.04 . Everything is working, except for the display, which seems to be compressed to half the screen and is green and purple. If someone could assist with this, it’d be much appreciated.
My apologies but how are you running Ubuntu 13.04? That doesn’t get released until April…
@shockdesign I’m guessing he’s using an alpha build.
@cooprocks123e Which driver are you using (i.e., what kind of hardware)? I had good luck with the open source radeon driver on my fusion laptop but it’s been quite a while since I tried it.
I have exactly the same issue on Arch Linux, on two different laptops (one 32-bit, the other 64-bit). Both have Intel Integrated Graphics, using the i915 kernel module in KMS mode.
Yep, I’m running Ubuntu 13.04 development build (it’s the only version of Ubuntu or Debian that had Mesa 9), on an Intel HD3000 with the i915 module. Is it safe to assume that it only affects these graphics processors?
I’ll try it this evening with both my fusion laptop and HD4000 htpc and see if it’s broken everywhere now or just on Intel.
Tested on HD3000 on Arch. It’s broken here as well. This is a regression in the driver because it worked just fine before … Don’t recall changing anything in KMS driver 
Can anyone name a kernel version where it is working? Im using 3.8.0-5-generic which is the default kernel for ubuntu 13.04
3.6.0 worked for me at least. Might be intel-dri though … :v
Alright, I guess I’ll download and compile 3.6.0 or earlier later tonight. Thanks.
OK, I just tested RetroArch using kernel 3.4.30 instead of 3.8.0-5 (from Ubuntu 13.04), and there was no change in behaviour, so you think that the issue might be a recent change in the DRI driver for the Intel i915 graphics processors?
In addition, Mesa development version 9.1 includes this in the changelog: “Removed i965’s broken hardware implementation of GL_NV_vertex_program”. Now could this have fixed the issue that we’ve been having?
No, it couldn’t. Could just be the DRI driver being broken. Someone should try to talk to upstream about this. As far as I know, RetroArch is the only “normal” application that even tries to use KMS/GBM/EGL, so it might be very undertested. The other one is … Wayland
Can anyone confirm if it’s working with other GPUs?
I tried it briefly last night on my AMD fusion laptop using the open source driver and it wouldn’t even launch, though I may have been doing something wrong. It’s been awhile since I tried it and I can’t remember if I needed to do anything special.
I built with --enable-kms, then dropped down to console with Ctrl+Alt+F1, then tried to launch it. It fails with:
RetroArch [ERROR] :: Failed to create SDL window.
RetroArch [ERROR] :: Cannot open video driver ... Exiting ...
RetroArch [ERROR] :: Fatal error received in: "init_video_input()"
This is on Ubuntu 12.10 Quantum Quoggle or whatever.
It also borks my console and makes the cursor and anything I type from then on invisible until i reboot, though I can still enter commands and so on.
Tested on my desktop with Radeon open-source driver. Pretty much the same issue.
Looks like it was my bad. I was using a pixel format that didn’t go well with others. Apparently, it happened to do the “right thing” before.
Works fine here now 
https://github.com/Themaister/RetroArch/commit/35813414bef12dda9497b41b85747f8c5d0d0994
I also cleaned up some cruft, so the code should be more robust now.
EDIT: Tested on my HD3000 laptop. Works here as well.
Yeah I did a double-take when I read about this in the release notes, never seen it done before. Not sure how useful this is, but it is VERY cool. I can imagine it being very useful on a platform such as the Raspberry Pi, or for anyone looking for a “black box” solution such as an arcade cabinet.
I’ll give this a try tonight. Thanks Maister!
Ye, if I set the mode, it must be set back again on exit, or you get this “black screen”. RetroArch obviously tries to do this properly, but if something goes very wrong, you’re kind of screwed …
You can work around it by changing the terminal (alt + f1,2,3,4, etc). That forces a CRTC change and image should work agian.
This is now working perfectly on my netbook (Intel Integrated Graphics), really impressive stuff! I just have one minor question. On startup I get this message:
RetroArch [ERROR] :: Failed to init SDL video.
I have video_driver = “gl” in my config, and it works fine even with the error. If I change it to video_driver = “sdl”, it doesn’t start up. Just curious.
Thanks!
The GL driver tries to start all context backends until it finds something that works. It tries GLX, X/EGL, SDL then finally KMS.
Green and purple