Intel GMA 945 and DVMT settings
 

Hello all, I've tried searching for this in all forums, so if I've missed any solved threads(I don't think I have) I apologise in advance.


I'm currently having a bit of trouble with DVMT settings in my BIOS for my Compal EL81 laptop. It's got onboard Intel 945GMA, it's not one of the new ones, has an Intel Core Duo 1.66 in it. Anyway, when messing around in the BIOS I noticed you can change your graphics memory to DVMT mode, which gives me a total possible graphics memory capacity of 223MB vs the 128MB I was running on. This is slower, and compositing doesn't work very well some of the time in xfce4. Really, it's not generating any errors during boot, I don't see anything in dmesg and applications aren't crashing. It's just that on boot up, sometimes the opengl applications (like Cairo Dock) are a bit wonky and I have to CTRL-ALT-BKSPC in order to fix it.

I've not been able to find anything in the kernel configs, but I'm fairly new to compiling and some of the options are pretty cryptic. I just finished compiling the 3.11.6 kernel for my system and everything works but this one slight problem. Is this linux-specific? I've read that it's supposed to increase performance for Windows laptops but I haven't found anything about linux. I really like that I have this option, provided it actually works correctly. Any input?

Thanks.