Direct UEFI Screen To Primary VGA

Dear Hftsai256,

Thanks for posting!

BIOS screen can be shown either from the graphics card or integrated graphics.
BIOS screen cannot be shown from both the graphics card and the integrated graphics at the same time.

To allow the BIOS image showing from onboard when a VGA card is installed.
Kindly update a BETA BIOS BIOS 1.22 from the link below:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1KxQUK-zsa4dMLdWMibhcq4BYl2eXNj9P

Then try to adjust the following setting:
Primary Graphics Adapter = Onboard

With thanks,
ASRock TSD

Edited by ASRock_TSD - 01 Jun 2020 at 7:57pm

Found one bug: UEFI screen will only appear from a cold boot. Any sort of reboot -- exiting UEFI, restart from bootloader, reboot from OS, will lost signal on primary graphics adapter if set to Onboard until OS takes over the framebuffer.

Monitor: LG 27EA31 on HDMI cable

After setting primary graphic adapter to onboard, the first cold boot will have monitor signal shown up immediately to onboard HDMI port. Any sort of warm reset/reboot will cause my monitor lost its signal on the same port until getty@ttyN.service hits. In other words, I would be completely clueless during the boot time until the operating system re-initiates framebuffer. Therefore, I won't be able to do kernel work, debug bootloader settings or check around with UEFI shell.

(Well I could do those things by unplugging my graphics card but that's an absurd workaround.)

I'm not quite understand what "system" means in your 3rd description. Can you see the booting UEFI splash screen through onboard HDMI port on a reboot?

Operating system shouldn't matter and I would be surprised if Windows cannot figure out the correct framebuffer on the primary device. The issue I'm talking about is taking place __before__ entering operating system. Like you have suggested above, when I have no drive attached to my system, and I do a straight reboot in UEFI (exit without saving changes), I lost my screen.

Interestingly, if you look into the dmesg report:

...
[    2.589742] i915 0000:00:02.0: vgaarb: deactivate vga console
[    2.598807] ACPI: Video Device [GFX0] (multi-head: yes rom: no post: no)
[    2.599194] input: Video Bus as /devices/LNXSYSTM:00/LNXSYBUS:00/PNP0A08:00/LNXVIDEO:00/input/input9
[    2.638981] fbcon: i915drmfb (fb0) is primary device
[    2.638982] fbcon: Deferring console take-over
[    2.638985] i915 0000:00:02.0: fb0: i915drmfb frame buffer device
...

Kernel defers console to the correct framebuffer around 2.6 seconds but my screen doesn't show up until 8-9 seconds after boot. I would suggest during a warm reset, fbcon is not properly initialized to the correct power state and therefore UEFI was unable to write display data to the primary framebuffer. Common init error if that's the case.

I would expect a higher level conversation when I know I'm talking to professional/technical people.

hftsai256 wrote: I would suggest during a warm reset, fbcon is not properly initialized to the correct power state and therefore UEFI was unable to write display data to the primary framebuffer.

Here I mean vga console, not fbcon. Sorry for the typo.