How to increase video memory allocation

Librem
1

Is it possible to increase the memory allocation to graphics within coreboot.

In particular, I have a librem 13v2 with 16Gb of ram and want to get the most out of the inbuilt graphics. It is my understanding with a normal BIOS you would change the memory allocation within the bios memory. However, there is no menu in coreboot. When updating coreboot (via the script) is it possible to increase the memory allocation or would it already have been set at maximum.

I run Manjaro Linux and have not yet updated coreboot since i bought my laptop last year

2

the Intel i915 driver dynamically allocates system RAM to video RAM as needed (up to 2GB, IIRC), there’s no need to specify a fixed amount (in the firmware or otherwise).

3 Likes
3

did you mean to say that you’d want to bump it past the 2GB limit ? somehow ?

4

Before you would want to do that, you would want to know how to monitor how much RAM is allocated to video RAM. (That is, no point bumping past 2GB if it is only using a few hundred MB.) Anyone know what the command is to monitor that?

5

Thanks for the advice people, i wanted to know because i’m running a game on play on linux and it wanted to know how much video memory i had (so it can allocate wine resources better presumably), and heard with some cards you can increase the max and i don’t normally use all the ram so thought i might as well try it

6

To find out the maximum allowed video memory:
glxinfo | egrep -i 'device|memory'

To find out how much video memory is currently being used:
egrep -i 'mem|kB' /var/log/Xorg.0.log
(This doesn’t work on my HP laptop with integrated Intel graphics in a Core i5-6200U, but it seems to work on some machines.)

7

Nor for me on a computer with integrated Intel graphics.

8

Looking at this I have

    Device: Mesa DRI Intel(R) HD Graphics 520 (Skylake GT2)  (0x1916)
    Video memory: 3072MB
    Unified memory: yes

which translates to 3Gb of video memory

9

this is the output of the second command, only the first part seems relevant although it’s pointing to a memory location so i don’t know if it actually is, maybe htop has a api for this

[     5.990] (--) PCI:*(0@0:2:0) 8086:1916:8086:2212 rev 7, Mem @ 0xd0000000/16777216, 0xc0000000/268435456, I/O @ 0x00001c00/64, BIOS @ 0x????????/131072
[     6.351] (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105"
[     6.351] (**) Option "xkb_layout" "gb"
[     6.444] (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105"
[     6.444] (**) Option "xkb_layout" "gb"
[     6.497] (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105"
[     6.497] (**) Option "xkb_layout" "gb"
[     6.591] (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105"
[     6.591] (**) Option "xkb_layout" "gb"
[     6.644] (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105"
[     6.644] (**) Option "xkb_layout" "gb"
[     6.871] (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105"
[     6.871] (**) Option "xkb_layout" "gb"
[  3410.514] (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105"
[  3410.514] (**) Option "xkb_layout" "gb"
[  3424.824] (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105"
[  3424.824] (**) Option "xkb_layout" "gb"
[  7278.860] (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105"
[  7278.860] (**) Option "xkb_layout" "gb"