On Apr 11, 2005 2:32 PM, Michael <macallan18@earthlink.net> wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> > I made another test kernel:
> > http://macallan.homeunix.org:6704/stuff/BSD/sparc/SPARCbook3GX_04_11.bz2
> > Changes:
> > - added MSDOSFS ( for CF cards and such )
> > - more tweaking of byte-swapping code in the PCMCIA driver
> 
> These changes:
> > - working wsmouse ( uses the same code as sparc64 - ms* at zstty?  )
> > - CG3 emulation in pnozz turned off
> are mainly for XFree86. I got the cg3 driver to work earlier but started my own a few days ago so the cg3 emulation had to go :)
> Since XFree86 doesn't know how to talk to a Sun mouse directly there had to be wsmouse support.
> What works so far:
> - XFree86 4.4 ( didn't use 4.5 because it had some serious problems on other platforms )
> - 8 bit colour. Nothing else yet
> - hardware cursor. So far the only really useful thing the cg3 driver wouldn't do too ;)
> 
> What doesn't work:
> - external mice - that's a driver problem in NetBSD
> - any non-native resolution, mode switching or external monitor support
> - acceleration, although simple screen-to-screen copy stuff should be very easy to add, Line drawing and colour expansion isn't that hard either. We'll see.
> - for some reason the Xserver hangs on exit - no idea why yet.
> 
> If anyone is foolhardy enough to play with it I'll tar the binaries together and make them available for download. The Xserver needs the kernel mentioned above or something newer with my changes to the pnozz driver and cg3 emulation disabled, it will /not/ work with stock kernels, if emulation is in place it will use the cg3 driver.


Sure, I'll give it a shot. Is this a full release we're talking about,
or tarballs of X and such? I can trivially backup/restore my sparcbook
using an old 1 gig external sun scsi drive I've got sitting around
somewhere. (one thing that truly amazes me... I'm used to (and
admittedly spoiled by) SATA150 drives... hard to believe that what
these boxes use is called "fast scsi" ;)

Also, these boxes *are* technically capable of at least 16 bit color,
right? I don't mean that it's working in NetBSD now, but that there is
hope that it will, eventually? I sense great potential for use as X
Terminals :-)

(I ran KDE remotely from my main workstation displaying on my SB3GX...
The collide light on my transceiver was blinking even faster than the
send/recv lights :-P

> Besides that it's surprisingly usable even without acceleration. I can't help wondering if Sun's Xserver used any acceleration on this chip at all.

Even with the CG3 emulation, it wasn't bad, and that was with
everything further limited by what 10baseT half-duplex could handle.
More color depth plus support for external sun mice and it'd be a
great little X machine.

-- 
Sean