Mobile GMA 900 on Laptop with Tiger

[mcdull]

I guess many people are expecting their laptop with GMA900 (Intel Integreated Display) to work with QE.

However, many of us have to attach a second monitor in order to make it work (every time starting up the OSX). Here this thread is to investigate and hopefully to solve this problem. Everyone can describe and provide solution so that we can solve this problem or at least a better work around.

 

I first would like to contribute that having OSX to boot with QE support without external monitor is NOT IMPOSSIBLE. I first think that my laptop have no external VGA port and therefore I had never tried to attach one on it. But I still have some times to get my laptop to work with QE. At that time, I have wonderful experience on using OpenGL to run SNES emulator (bomber man 5).

 

So let's get on it...

[mcdull]

Okay, let us start a bit work here.

First of all we do need to collect some information to determine the problem, you know, I have just one laptop that can't do much.

 

here is a couple of questions that I would like to confirm.

1. Do any of you having hardware ID 2592 managed to get it work without external monitor consistanly?

2. Do any of you get MIRRORING work while having external monitor connected?

3. Do you have any means to access to the OS while in blue screen?

 

P.S. Please also indicate your hardware configuration, better show it in signature or personal info. Thanks

[suleiman]

I'm all for a solution to this problem, so i'll put in my two cents.

 

1. I have only on one occassion that never reproduced itself, been able to boot into OS X without an external monitor attached.

2. I have not been able to get mirroring to work

3. The only means I know of to acess the OS, are in single user mode at the command prompot.

 

Running a Dell D610, Pentium M, with, of course, a GMA900.

[mcdull]

thanks for your input.

I actually suspect the kext is not complete in some aspect so that it detect the primary display incorrectly. And therefore it not draw the desktop correctly without the external display connected. And of course at this point they do not have any error handling code. It would be great if we can force the mode instead of making it detect by itself. Will keep on tying.

[mcdull]

Just learnt that a file may be related to the display setting. This file is located in /Library/Preferences, and it's named com.apple.windowserver.plist

[mcdull]

WARNING !!!!

 

The steps below may damage your hardware !!!!!!!!!!

 

Now we all know that OSX need external monitor to wake up the GUI, we can actually fool it by using adaptors as other people mentioned. However, I don't want to buy the adaptor nor DIY one by myself.

 

As I am using Fujitsu Laptop with a mini-Svideo jack (suppose to be used with external TV) which share the same type of plug with stereo earphone. I take the risk that may damage the hardware and plug a normal headphone to boot the machine. And .... it starts.

 

HOWEVER, the internal screen being the secondary screen and that means I cannot access to the menu bar nor everything except the right click menu. Moreover, the headphone will make some noise and I think at that time you should unplug it...

 

WARNING, don't try it unless you think you can afford to lost your NB.

[mcdull]

After one screen adjustment, I can now properly start the OSX without an external monitor with the help of a earphone. I find it more convinance because I always have my mp3 player with me (so as the earphone).

 

QE and CI works perfectly.

[suleiman]

i'm sorry man, but i have no clue what you're talking about.

 

edit: okay, i finally figured out what you were talking about McDull. Your latop has a mini S-video port that's shaped the same as a headphone jack. So you used your headphones to fool the OS into thinking you have a TV plugged in there. I'm now starting to understand what Urby3 was talking about before, he took his s-video out port, plugged in a regular svideo out adapter to ut, then took another adapter to plug that into his headphone jack. Cool. I'll try it out today.

[outoftheboxx10]

my laptop sometimes boots up and mirrors to my notebook lcd and sometimes mirrors to the vga plug, and sometimes hangs when loading the gui, and sometimes functions properly and makes the main disply the lcd....most of the time i just close my notebook(hibernating it) and turn it back on and it will be fine with the main display being my notebook lcd...just a trick, thought i'd share....reasoning with mine is that for some reason it falsely detects that i have something plugged into vga or svideo or dvi out.....not sure what makes it think there is something plugged in and why it would make any of those the main display without me configuring it for that...but for some reason it feels the need to use that as my primary display...any thoughts on why?

[suleiman]

I wouldn't be able to tell you man, but I figured out that hibernating trick pretty quick too. Thanks for sharing it with the rest of the community dude.

 

P.S. I've come to expect just about anything from this OS.

[mcdull]

I wouldn't be able to tell you man, but I figured out that hibernating trick pretty quick too. Thanks for sharing it with the rest of the community dude.

 

P.S. I've come to expect just about anything from this OS.

 

The hibernating trick did not work for me. For some reason once my system hibernate, it wakes up with no back light.. I see display there in a dark screen, I need to place it under sun light to operate it.

[Tak]

I'm hoping that the new version of the 915 kexts (from 10.4.3) will solve this problem. They won't load on 10.4.1 because they've been compiled for the 10.4.3 kernel. So we won't know until 10.4.3 is cracked.

[suleiman]

Tak, we already have the updated kernel from the 10.4.3 updater, so why not release the kexts so we can try them out here? It's not hard to go into single user mode and delete them if they fail after all!

[Tak]

Tak, we already have the updated kernel from the 10.4.3 updater, so why not release the kexts so we can try them out here? It's not hard to go into single user mode and delete them if they fail after all!

 

Sure, here you go

 

BTW, the 10.4.3 "update" doesn't update the kernel - it only updates frameworks and apps etc, which is why these drivers won't load. Feel free to give them a try and let me know your results. Use kextload -t to load them immediately and show errors.

 

Having looked at the plists further it appears that only the .plugin file references the "2582" device ID. The other files reference any device ID with four digits (0x00008086 with a 0x0000ffff mask) and a class ID of 0x03 (which is the graphics card class).

 

Oh, and AppleIntelIntegratedGraphics.kext is now called AppleIntelIntegratedFramebuffer.kext

[suleiman]

thanks! I'll give these a whirl and see where we're at.

 

So here are the results posted below. Take a look tak and see if you can make any sense of them. It seems as though you were right about the wrong kernel being at work. I just can't figure that out since I have a backup of mach_kernel on my main disk, which would lead me to believe the kernel was replaced. Though maybe this was only a 10.4.1 patched kernel and not a true 10.4.3 kernel.

 

Anyways here's the results:

 

macosx-3:/system/library/extensions root# kextload -t appleintel915.kext

can't add kernel extension appleintel915.kext (validation error) (run kextload on this kext with -t for diagnostic output)

kernel extension appleintel915.kext has problems:

Validation failures

{

"Kext has a kernel dependency prior to version 6.0 and CFBundleIdentifier does not match executable's MODULE_NAME" = true

}

 

macosx-3:/system/library/extensions root# kextload -t appleintelintegratedframebuffer.kext

can't add kernel extension appleintelintegratedframebuffer.kext (validation error) (run kextload on this kext with -t for diagnostic output)

kernel extension appleintelintegratedframebuffer.kext has problems:

Validation failures

{

"Kext has a kernel dependency prior to version 6.0 and CFBundleIdentifier does not match executable's MODULE_NAME" = true

}

Authentication failures

{

"File owner/permissions are incorrect" = (

"/System/Library/Extensions/appleintelintegratedframebuffer.kext"

"/System/Library/Extensions/appleintelintegratedframebuffer.kext/Info.plist"

"/System/Library/Extensions/appleintelintegratedframebuffer.kext/AppleIntelIntegratedFramebuffer"

)

}

[Tak]

Yep, I get the same kernel dependency errors as it requires the 10.4.3 kernel. Drivers are low level so they tie in tightly with the kernel, they won't work on anything else.

[suleiman]

bummmer man...so we have to wait until 10.4.3 is cracked? That'll take forever! Maybe we can just find a way to use the patched kernel once it's cracked. I'm going to retun the 50 dollars worth of stuff I bought of course.

[aroman]

It seems that the reason this doesn't work all the time is because of a "Feature" in the laptop graphics chip. It allocates video memory dynamically. But, of course, the driver needs to tell it if in needs more memory, and the mac os x driver doesn't know that!

 

The way to work around that is to boot to windows so that windows can allocate the memory, then boot to mac os x with -v -f options (might work without them?).

 

So, we could possibly modify the AppleIntel915... driver to take that into account, or we could write a program that just tells the graphics chip to allocate a bunch of memory, before the AppleIntel915 kext loads.

 

Now all I need to do is learn how to develop drivers for Mac OS X / Darwin...