First steps with Sculpt on Dell XPS 13

[Roman Iten]

Hi,

for some time now I've been thinking about upgrading:) my day-to-day
operating system from bare metal Linux to Sculpt. My Dell XPS 13 (9350)
doesn't boot out of the box and I didn't had the time to investigate.
Now the cool new report_dump gives me a chance to easily spot problems
when using Sculpt on my laptop.

So I prepared "Sculpt as a hardware-probing instrument" as described in
the release notes [1]. But it seems like the XPS doesn't boot far enough
as no reports are dumped...

I suspected there's probably an issue related to the XPS' display
resolution of 3200 x 1800. After all it's clearly been declared in
Sculpts hardware requirements [2], that displays with a higher
resolution than 2560 x 1440 "are not expected to work". I tried to
artificially restrict the resolution to FHD [3]. The internal display
still doesn't work, but when an external monitor is connected via an
USB-C dock or adapter (!), the Leitzentrale is displayed and the
report_dump subsystem dumps reports to the flash memory.

Using Leitzentrale, I then updated config/fb_drv to enable the internal
display with it's native resolution. All screens go blank, but now I
have a log to share [4] (the reconfiguration of the fb_drv happens after
line 500)

So far my very first experiences with Sculpt on the Dell XPS 13. And
here some related questions:

1. What do you think about the idea to generally restrict the resolution
of the initial fb_drv configuration to the maximum resolution supported
by Sculpt (instead of that of the connected display(s), which may break
Sculpt), similar to [3]? This would also help if, for example, an
external 4K TV is connected during boot.

2. On Sculpt, most/all? internal displays report only their native
resolution. On the XPS this is 3200 x 1800 and I can't force a lower
resolution. Although under Linux, xrandr reports a bunch of supported
resolutions from 3200 x 1800 down to 640 x 360. Does the intel_fb_drv
under Genode intentionally reports and supports only the native resolution?

3. Should I create an issue regarding [4] on GitHub?

4. Instead of installing Sculpt directly on my current laptop I consider
to buy a new XPS 13 (9370). It has a Killer 1435 wireless module
featuring a Qualcomm Atheros QCA6174A chip which seems to be supported
on Linux by the ath10k module... Has someone any experience (or
assumptions) whether there's a chance that it will work on Sculpt (right
now or in the near future)?


Cheers, Roman


[1] https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/18.08
[2] https://genode.org/documentation/articles/sculpt-tc
[3]
https://github.com/rite/genode/commit/ba65d4307e892320b791b52cdccca1d421694f5a
[4]
https://gist.github.com/rite/1e5602c9ed55a810fe9306475e3962c0#file-log-L501



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