The EDID is a small binary blob your display sends to your system that describes the capabilities of the display, for example, what physical dimensions it is, or what resolution is supports at what clockrates.
I recently had to modify my EDID to fix a DTD (Detailed Timing Descriptor), which caused the display to report a 59.93 Hz refresh rate mode that actually could only do about 48 Hz. Nudging around the pixel clock and V-Blank "fixed" this by changing it to a 60.10 Hz mode that could only do 59.93 Hz.
This guide is specific to Intel GPUs. On nvidia, you'll have to use a different approach.
First, find out which display you want to mod the EDID of. The output of
xrandr should give you a good idea.
$ xrandr | grep primary
eDP-1 connected primary 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 294mm x 165mm
As you can see, eDP-1 is my monitor.
The EDID of your display should be in /sys/class/drm/card0-$MONITOR/edid.
For example, this translates to /sys/class/drm/card0-eDP-1/edid for me.
If you have more than one GPU and the monitor is connected to the second GPU,
it won't be card0 but card1 of course.
Download wxEDID and compile it, then run it and load the EDID binary from the previous location.
If you want to modify the DTD like me, select the DTD that you want to edit, and head to the "DTD Constructor" tab.
In the DTD Constructor tab, you get to play around with various things such as the pixel clock. As you can see, it spits out a X11 Mode line at the bottom. This is useful; with that, we can test a new mode without rebooting.
Testing a modeline is as simple as adding it through xrandr
xrandr --newmode "1920x1080x60.10" 138.76 1920 1968 2000 2080 1080 1083 1088 1110
xrandr --addmode eDP-1 1920x1080x60.10
xrandr --output eDP-1 --mode 1920x1080x60.10
# test stuff now, e.g. by running glxgears with vsync and looking at the output fps
# after you're done, you can switch back and remove the temporary mode again
xrandr --output eDP-1 --mode 1920x1080 # switch back the mode
xrandr --delmode eDP-1 1920x1080x60.10 # remove our test mode from the output
xrandr --rmmode 1920x1080x60.10 # delete our test mode
If you've found a DTD that works for you, save your modded EDID binary to
/usr/lib/firmware/edid/. If that directory doesn't exist, create it.
Last but not least, add the kernel option
drm_kms_helper.edid_firmware=$YOURMONITOR:edid/$YOUREDIDFILENAME
replacing $YOURMONITOR and $YOUREDIDFILENNAME according to your specific
setup.
Once you reboot, the modified DTD should result in different auto-detected modes in xrandr's output.