Hi All, long time user first time asker

 

I have a new system I am testing out using the Intel ManageEngine KVM. This requires a dummy plug to see any display, which I have obtained. The issue is that the dummy supports "up to 4K" which of course Unraid is selecting 4K as the best available resolution for the console once it has booted, leaving unreadably small text on the KVM.

 

I have been scouring the forums and all I seem to find is people with the inverse problem, their console being too low of a resolution, and thus requiring modifying the syslinux, loading a nvidia driver, or booting to UEFI, none of which I believe apply to this.

 

Is there a way to limit the upper resolution of the console at all? I can't really modify the EDID of the dummy plug, and attempting to set syslinux to vga=6 failed. Connecting the system to a 1280x1024 monitor for booting, THEN plugging in the dummy, kept the KVM res at the same 1280x1024, but then rebooting the box returned it back to best-available 4K.

 

Thanks in advance!

This being the line in dmesg - is there a way to restrict this to lower?
 

[   19.776727] Console: switching to colour frame buffer device 512x135

 

After another 1.5hrs of searching I finally managed to stumble across some more info, from user "frr" on superuser https://superuser.com/questions/570110/how-to-make-the-linux-framebuffer-console-narrower

 

It really is as simple as adding video=<hres>x<vres>@<refresh> to the sysconfig! e.g. video=1600x1000@60

 

Leaving this hoping to help someone else in future as this took me forever! Unraid version 6.12.9.

 

I tried this on my setup to try and force the non-GUI resolution to 1280x720 but it doesn't work. Any idea?

label Unraid OS

menu default

kernel /bzimage

append initrd=/bzroot video=1280x720@60

Edited October 27, 2025Oct 27 by urmyboyblue

I noticed this error in my log

[drm] User-defined mode not supported: "1280x720"

then did some searching and found this article

Unix & Linux Stack Exchange

How can I change the resolution for DRM?

I need to change the standard resolution for my DRM mode. How can I achieve that? When I do cat on cat /sys/class/drm/card0/card0-HDMI-A-1/modes 1920x1080 1920x1080 1920x1080 1280x720 1280x720 128...

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/fb/modedb.html

After looking in my /sys/class/drm/ directory, it seems like my "connected" HDMI port is card0-HDMI-A-2 (based on the "status" file showing "connected"). I then changed my append statement to this and rebooted. The error is gone but still no luck with the resolution.

video=HDMI-A-2:1280x720@60