VBETOOL(8)

📦 version 1.1, in debian bookworm, debian trixie, ubuntu jammy, ubuntu noble, ubuntu questing, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

👑 VBETOOL — the manual page, but make it a group chat

okay bestie, sit down, we're talking about vbetool, a section 8 (system administration) command. yes it's giving "why is this in the scary section" energy, and yes, you're gonna wanna read the warnings before you type anything, no cap. 💖

✨ NAME ✨

vbetool — run real-mode video BIOS code to alter hardware state

like, actually poke the video BIOS. the real one. live. 🔥

📜 SYNOPSIS 📜

vbetool [[vbestate save|restore]|[vbemode set|get]|[vgamode]|[dpms
on|off|standby|suspend|reduced]|[post [romfile]]|[vgastate
on|off]|[vbefp panelid|panelsize|getbrightness|setbrightness|invert]]

💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

so. vbetool uses lrmi in order to run code from the video BIOS. that's the whole vibe. it reaches into the BIOS and makes it do stuff.

currently, it is able to:

  • alter DPMS states 🌙
  • save/restore video card state 💾
  • attempt to initialize the video card from scratch 🧚

that last one is genuinely main character energy, not gonna lie.

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

vbetool takes the following options:

  • vbestate — vbetool will use the VESA 0x4f0f extensions to save or restore hardware state. this gets sent to, or read from, stdin. 🫶
⚠️ this information is highly hardware specific — do not attempt to restore state saved from a different machine. like, do not. also, this command will not work unless you are at a text console, because it interferes badly with X. 💀
  • dpms — vbetool will use the VESA 0x4f10 extensions to alter the power management state of your screen. "On", "off", "standby", "suspend" and "reduced" are acceptable further options and determine which state will be activated. 🌈
  • vbemode — vbetool will get or set the current VESA mode. "get" will return the current mode number on stdout — "set" will set the mode to the next argument. ✨
  • vgamode — vbetool will set the legacy VGA mode to the following numeric argument. 🔢
  • post — vbetool will attempt to run BIOS code located at c000:0003. this is the code run by the system BIOS at boot in order to initialise the video hardware. 🧠
😭 note that on some machines (especially laptops), not all of this code is present after system boot — as a result, executing this command may result in undefined behaviour. so like, yolo but make it risky.

this command must be run from a text console, as it will otherwise interfere with the operation of X. 🖥️

this command takes an optional argument which is the location of a file containing a ROM image. if provided, this image will be mapped to the c000 segment and used instead of the system's video BIOS. 💾

  • vgastate — vbetool will enable or disable the current video card. on most hardware, disabling will cause the hardware to stop responding until it is re-enabled. you probably don't want to do this if you're using a framebuffer. 🫣
  • vbefp — vbetool will execute a VESA flat panel interface call.
    • panelid will provide information about the panel 📋
    • panelsize will provide the size of the panel 📐
    • getbrightness will provide the current screen brightness as an integer 🔆
    • setbrightness accepts an integer as an argument and will set the screen brightness to that 🌞
    • invert will invert the colours of the screen 🙃

🐛 BUGS 🐛

  • switching dpms modes may interact badly with X on some systems. 😬
  • the vbestate command may behave in strange ways. 👀
  • the post command may result in the execution of arbitrary code that happens to be lying around in the area where chunks of your video BIOS used to be. 💀💀💀 (fr fr, read that one twice)
  • the VESA specification does not require that "vbemode get" provides the correct mode if the current mode was set via some means other than the VESA BIOS extensions. 🤷
  • the VESA flat panel interface ceased development at the proposal stage. panelid and panelsize will work on many machines, but the other arguments are unlikely to be implemented on available hardware. 🪦

🫶 AUTHOR 🫶

vbetool was written by Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org>, based on code from read-edid by John Fremlin <john@fremlin.de>, LRMI (http://sourceforge.net/projects/lrmi/) and XFree (http://www.xfree86.org). it is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. 👑

and that's the whole page, bestie 💖 this icon of a manual is vbetool version 0.2, dated 31 December 2004 — yes she's vintage, yes she still slays. now go back up and reread the BUGS section before you run post, i'm literally begging you 🎀✨

📦 where this page comes from