Re: Switching to Xorg

[Michael Lorenz <macallan%netbsd.org@localhost>]

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Hello,

On Apr 7, 2008, at 17:25, raymond.meyer%rambler.ru@localhost wrote:
> On Monday 07 April 2008 21:22:07 Michael Lorenz wrote:
> > Yes, if you find one that comes with Sun firmware. They sold a few
> > ATI and 3Dlabs ones under their own name - the PGX32 is a Permedia2,
> > the XVR-100 is a Radeon and the other PGXes are different mach64
> > variants.
>
> Does it have to have Sun firmware?

Yes.

> I mean I'm not bothered about accessing  console during boot, as  
> long as Xserver can initialise and redirect output to a PCI  
> graphics card.

If X wants to access a PCI graphics board it currently needs to be  
the console. Part of the reason is that - unlike many 32bit machines  
- - PCI bus addresses don't coincide with their physical addresses from  
the CPU's point of view, the console driver hides that from the  
Xserver so it can mmap PCI resources with their bus addresses, but  
only for the console. Also, the physical address of the PCI address  
space depends on the machine and to make things more complicated some  
Ultras have more than one PCI bus.

> For example, if I use ATI Rage 128, will Xorg be able to use it?

Only if it's the console. We do have a console driver for this chip  
( see r128fb ) but it depends on the firmware to set up some sort of  
graphics mode and has only been tested on macppc. Also, it still  
needs to be the console and that won't happen if the mainboard's  
firmware doesn't know the chip or the card doesn't come with Sun  
firmware.

Before you ask - none of this is different with Xorg, it may change  
with their next major release if someone ports libpciaccess to NetBSD.

have fun
Michael

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