Custom VESA Resolutions
Apart from the standard VESA resolutions, the VESA BIOS
enables you to add up to 16 custom video modes which will be reported to the guest operating system. When using
Windows guests with the Guest Additions, a custom graphics
driver will be used instead of the fallback VESA solution so this information does not apply.
Additional video modes can be configured for each VM using the extra data facility. The extra data key is called
CustomVideoModex
with x being a number from 1 to 16. Please note that modes will be read from 1 until
either the following number is not defined or 16 is reached. The following example adds a video mode that
corresponds to the native display resolution of many notebook computers:
$ VBoxManage setextradata VM-name "CustomVideoMode1" "1400x1050x16"
The VESA mode IDs for custom video modes start at 0x160. In order to use the above defined
custom video mode, the following command line has to be supplied to Linux:
vga = 0x200 | 0x160
vga = 864
For guest operating systems with Guest Additions, a custom
video mode can be set using the video mode hint feature.