X on octane VPro?

Galahad · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 12 Feb 2003 Posts: 126

I'm interested in the status of this.

I just installed ~mips gentoo on my octane2 V6 and X shows some strange errors with FBDEV and can't mmap something. I had assumed the fbdev driver should work in any case.

Redhatter · Posted: Mon Aug 07, 2006 2:00 am Post subject:

Heh, I could've told you that would happen before you tried. :-)

The issue here, is that fbdev relies on mapping a chunk of the video board's memory (using mmap) into system memory for X to read and write to. This is only possible on the O2's GBE, thanks to UMA -- the video card simply uses the main system memory. As VPro (and Impact, and Newport, and Extreme) don't share their memory with the main system, it's not possible to map this memory into the address space and make it directly accessible to X. So any data for the video card needs to be transferred manually.

This would be fine... but nobody knows (except SGI, who are remaining tight-lipped) how to do DMA with VPro. Thus any data would have to be done using PIO, making things painfully slow, and chewing CPU time to buggery. If someone knows how, and is at liberty to reveal the secret ... an X driver may become possible (and an X driver with OpenGL no less... the geometry engine is already understood, and is used for rendering the console), but until then, it's not technically feasable to do.
_________________
Stuart Longland (a.k.a Redhatter, VK4MSL)
I haven't lost my mind - it's backed up on a tape somewhere...

Gentoo/MIPS Cobalt developer, Mozilla herd member.

Galahad · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 12 Feb 2003 Posts: 126

I thought it would be something like that

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ddc · Guru Joined: 29 Aug 2006 Posts: 522

Galahad · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 12 Feb 2003 Posts: 126

I used the livecd from dev.gentoo.org/~kumba

Kumba · Posted: Thu Sep 21, 2006 8:14 pm Post subject:

Anything found in my dev directory these days is to be considered highly experimental. I've got an X cd in the works for several of the systems, but that's been held up by my main desktop deciding to become a major PITA (stupid +12v rails in my PSU).

I'm hoping to get them all out as RC6 soon.

--Kumba
_________________
"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."
--Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic

Galahad · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 12 Feb 2003 Posts: 126

I have no problems with highly experimental. The whole linux-mips thing is highly experimental.

It worked fine

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Pliablemammal · n00b Joined: 02 Oct 2006 Posts: 52 Location: Sacramento

I have two extra impact frame buffers, one is MXI with texture and one is just the normal impact card but the MXI is full height so it's kinda a weird. It would work for your system since the impact driver is supported, but it doesn't seem like the Xorg stuff is DRI yet.

I'm in Northern California if you want to try it let me know.

I have like 3 extra Octanes all with at least a gig of ram in them.

iluxa · Retired Dev Joined: 18 Nov 2006 Posts: 52