About VIA chipsets

eddy89 · Posted: Tue Nov 21, 2006 4:09 pm Post subject: About VIA chipsets

Hi folks!
I have a Benq Joybook R23E, with a "fantastic" VIA chipset, the K8M800.
As you see, clicking the link, it has many features, like 3D graphics etc. You may think that it has colsed-source drivers, and it works just on windows enviorment, but is not so.
In the VIA Arena site, there is a section dedicated to opensource and to linux driver and so on (http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx?PageID=5&ArticleID=376).

I could find there driver for my video card, and hardware monitor tools, etc. and maybe many others hints.

I think that them are just waiting for gentoo, patch for kernel and drivers for video card (That actually don't work at the top form me cause of a 3d accel. problem). So I suggest a sort of bi-directional collaboration with gentoo, maybe adopting their patches, drivers and suggestiond, and making from our side some wiki pages, to be mirrored on their site, near the Fedora and other distros ones.

What do you think about that?

BradN · Posted: Tue Nov 21, 2006 5:20 pm Post subject:

I can't find source code for the Xfree/X.org driver. I can only see source code to the kernel framebuffer driver, which is useless for anything 3d.

bLUEbYTE84 · Posted: Tue Nov 21, 2006 5:25 pm Post subject:

Hi,
I also have this chipset on my desktop mobo and using the on-board video card. For some time I struggled to get decent accelerated framebuffer support, but I failed, then gave up. Their official framebuffer drivers are outdated, unstable, badly documented and slow.
Then I tried an official, more up-to-date driver from davesdomain.org.uk.viafb. This one only is more recent and a bit better documented, but all the issues remain (unaccelerated).

X drivers are another story... We're lucky in that our chipsets are directly supported inside the kernel (device drivers -> character devices -> DRM -> Via unichrome). So the kernel side is OK. But again, the X drivers of via is of really bad quality. Documentation is non-existent, kernel compatibility sucks, etc... They refer to that driver as kernel driver, so I guess it is a replacement of kernel DRM driver, but I don't see any reason to to use it. And as I understand, trying my best with their SUCKY documentation and web site navigation, they also have a X driver module, I also tried that and tried 'injecting' this into the xorg 6.9 sources and compiling, it compiled and worked but there was no diff. from the normal Xorg 6.9 via driver as I could see. Unaccelerated.

But, the via driver that comes with Xorg 7.1 is great. Together with kernel DRM stuff for unichrome, and Xorg 7.1 I have 2d, 3d acceleration, direct rendering all working properly. So, I tell you from experience that you just do this:
-Compile DRM support for VIA Unichrome in your kernel
-Add VIDEO_CARDS="via" in your make.conf
-emerge xorg-x11.

Edit: I jsut remembered there is also the Openchrome driver. It is just the unstable Xorg driver.
Make sure that the xorg server is compiled with via driver inside.
Then configure your xorg.conf.
- Driver "via"
- DRI mode 0666
- Load dri and glx modules.

Well that's about it. Post if you have any problems, I'll help if you have any. Good luck

eddy89 · Posted: Tue Nov 21, 2006 6:07 pm Post subject:

Well I have the same kernel. X and make.conf configuration, but it don't work very well in 3d: glxgears is ok (5xx FPS) but other things crash, are unstable or work very slow (googleearth is unstable(sometime panics the kernel) and ut2004 is really slows (1/20 FPS)).

If I use EXA acceleration, X simply doesn't start...

What versions/video card do you have?

x11-drivers/xf86-video-via-0.2.2
x11-libs/libXvMC-1.0.3
media-libs/mesa-6.5.1-r1
(--) Chipset K8M800 found (from Xorg.log)

bLUEbYTE84 · Posted: Tue Nov 21, 2006 6:47 pm Post subject:

eddy89 · Posted: Tue Nov 21, 2006 9:35 pm Post subject:

bLUEbYTE84 · Posted: Wed Nov 22, 2006 11:45 am Post subject:

eddy89 · Posted: Wed Nov 22, 2006 4:49 pm Post subject:

Oh wait, maybe NVIDIA drivers have full openGL support?? And maybe mine have not?

eddy89 · Posted: Sat Nov 25, 2006 1:30 pm Post subject:

Anyway, what about EXA acceleration in K8M800???