Posts Tagged ‘RHEL 7’


I’m doing some experiments with OpenWrt (http://openwrt.org), in particular, I need to build a custom firmware for a cheap router (a TP-Link WR-841N).
OpenWrt is modular enough to install packages on an already installed image, but when your flash memory size is 4MiB, you want to strip everything unnecessary and add everything you need inside the SquashFS file system.

Building a custom image doesn’t require recompiling anything, there is an ImageBuider package that just create the complete firmware image with a custom build script.

The ImageBuider package has been designed to run on an x86_64 Linux distro.

So I installed Centos 7.0 on Hyper-V on Windows 8.1, everything was working out great except for the screen resolution, that was stuck at 1152×864 (X.org is smart) in the Display Settings in Gnome, and my notebook display is 1366×768.
I would be pretty satisfied at running Linux with a resolution of 1024×768, it’s not that I really need 1366×768 at the moment, but even if 1024×768 is a lower resolution compared to 1152×864, X.org doesn’t allow to select any of the lower VGA, SVGA or XGA resolution.

It’s not that the VM is unusable, but it’s very frustrating dealing with scrollbars even in full-screen mode. The funny part is that Linux already include the Hyper-V integration services since kernel 3.3 or 3.4 or something like that and RHEL 7.0 currently use 3.10 (a giant leap forward from the 2.6.32 kernel of RHEL 6.x), but there was no way X.org recognized the Hyper-V framebuffer.

With the xorg.conf file gone a long time ago, we are in the era of autoconfig, monitor hotplugging, etc.

Microsoft state that the best way of connecting to a VM running in Hyper-V is via RDP, this requires having a stable network connection between the host and the guest OSs and having a RDP service running in the guest OS: pretty easy on Windows, a bit more complicated on Linux where xrdp, an RDP server, works but it’s not an easy solution and always require a stable network connection.
If the Hyper-V server is in the DataCenter, this surely is the best solution, but on a notebook this is a bit an overkill.

Looking at the output of lsmod, the hyperv_fb module is already loaded, so there is no reason for it not to work.

After following various guides with all the sort of commands, like adding a modeline to xrandr (doesn’t work), adding video=1366×768:24 to the kernel boot arguments (doesn’t work), adding resolution=1366×768 always to the kernel boot arguments (needless to say…), I’ve finally found the first alf of the solution in a forum about SUSE.

TL;DR

Adding in GRUB2 the kernel boot argument:

video=hyperv_fb:1366x768

finally allowed me to use the VM in full screen @ 1366×768!

Bye