On Sun, Dec 07, 2003 at 09:13:01PM +0100, Florence HENRY wrote:
> this 'not configured' bit doesn't matter *at all* for X support ? Does
> that mean that the video card will be able to work at is full capacity
> (1024x1780 @ 24bpp for example) ?
> 
> Maybe there is something that I do not understand, but does this mean that
> the netbsd kernel uses the video card without the help of the agp chipset?
> then, what is the role of the agp chipset if it is not used ?

Nothing special is needed to use AGP in itself. It looks like PCI. Any
video card will work fine. The 'agp' code is just code to talk to
the AGP GART, which is only used by *some* drivers in XFree86 to
get 3D acceleration. The only exception I know if are intel i8xx
chips, which do seem to need some AGP GART access to work in
normal mode. All other drivers will work just fine, you just might
not get fancy 3D acceleration on some (only used through libGL and
friends). It has no effect on the usable screen resolutions. None.

Also, note that the NetBSD kernel doesn't do much with the video card,
it only does enough to do normal text modes. All the video smarts
are in XFree86.

The 'agp' name may be a bit confusing, 'agpgart' may have been a better
name.

- Frank

-- 
Frank van der Linden                                            fvdl@netbsd.org
===============================================================================
NetBSD. Free, Unix-like OS. > 45 different platforms.    http://www.netbsd.org/