Re: XVR-500

Re: XVR-500

[Alex Buell]

On Fri, 2010-11-12 at 23:21 +0100, Frans van Berckel wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-11-12 at 12:56 -0800, David Miller wrote:
> > 
> > There is zero public documentation on this chipset, so yes you will
> > need to reverse engineer everything.  But you may look at the openbsd
> > driver for some hints as they've already undertaken reverse
> > engineering some of the chip variants.
> 
> Hi Alex,
> 
> If you are gonna reverse engineer it's good to know Martin Bochnig did
> work as well on porting the video drivers into OpenSolaris/marTux.
> 
> The keywords are: Intense3D, 3Dlabs, Sun Expert 3D & Wildcat 4110.

Thanks, most useful. 
-- 
Tactical Nuclear Kittens

Re: XVR-500

[Alex Buell]

[Added sparclinux@vger.kernel.org]

On Fri, 2010-11-12 at 15:27 -0800, David Miller wrote:
> From: Alex Buell <alex.buell@munted.org.uk>
> Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2010 23:15:09 +0000
> 
> > On Fri, 2010-11-12 at 12:56 -0800, David Miller wrote:
> > 
> >> That's why we need to override ->imageblit(), ->fillrect(), and
> >> ->copyarea() driver operations and can't just use the normal cfb* ones
> >> directly.
> >> 
> >> Therefore the X11 fbdev driver is never going to work properly, no
> >> matter what BPP or resolution you bring up the screen.
> > 
> > That's what I'm trying to understand - the console looks and works just
> > fine yet when the fbdev driver is loaded it doesn't get things right? I
> > thought it just run on top of the console driver? 
> 
> Nope, fbdev mmap()'s the framebuffer and writes directly to it.
> It doesn't use the console driver for anything other than mapping
> the framebuffer into the X server process's address space.

Since the console driver seems to work just fine, perhaps a new X11
driver might need to be written, using the wcfb driver from [Open|
Net]BSD as a reference. 

I will need to install OpenBSD on a spare disk and see how it works.
-- 
Tactical Nuclear Kittens

Re: XVR-500

[David Miller]

From: Alex Buell <alex.buell@munted.org.uk>
Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2010 13:27:30 +0000

> I will need to install OpenBSD on a spare disk and see how it works.

I think simply reading the OpenBSD sources will be less painful and
certainly less time consuming than doing a complete install.

But that's just me :-)

Re: XVR-500

[Alex Buell]

On Sun, 2010-11-14 at 10:42 -0800, David Miller wrote:
> From: Alex Buell <alex.buell@munted.org.uk>
> Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2010 13:27:30 +0000
> 
> > I will need to install OpenBSD on a spare disk and see how it works.
> 
> I think simply reading the OpenBSD sources will be less painful and
> certainly less time consuming than doing a complete install.
> 
> But that's just me :-)

Yes, I've been delving into the sources, NetBSD and OpenBSD, along with
your console frame buffer driver.

I've never seen such a weird-assed frame buffer, *two* separate buffers
for each of the bit depths; 8 bit depth and 32 bit depth? Probably
useful for page flipping to speed up drawing operations. 

All the open source drivers only support 8 bit depth operations. But I
noticed the presence of 32 bit depth buffers, has anyone ever figured
out a way to use them yet? 

In the meantime I've put together the bare beginnings of a X11 driver
for the XVR-500. It now detects the card and says so. 

The next things to do is to write some code to write into the frame
buffer's memory area and see how it all works together. This'll be fun. 
-- 
Tactical Nuclear Kittens

Re: XVR-500

[Alex Buell]

On Sun, 2010-11-14 at 10:42 -0800, David Miller wrote:
> From: Alex Buell <alex.buell@munted.org.uk>
> Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2010 13:27:30 +0000
> 
> > I will need to install OpenBSD on a spare disk and see how it works.
> 
> I think simply reading the OpenBSD sources will be less painful and
> certainly less time consuming than doing a complete install.
> 
> But that's just me :-)

I finally got a chance to take a photograph with my phone's camera the
pixellation that I'm seeing with the X11 fbdev driver on XVR-500. Have
you seen anything like this before? 

I'm still working on the X11 wildcatfb driver on and off, I've managed
to get it to recognize the card and print out its details into
Xorg.0.log but that's about it so far. 
-- 
Tactical Nuclear Kittens

Re: XVR-500

[Alex Buell]

On Mon, 2010-12-06 at 00:02 +0000, Alex Buell wrote:

I forgot to include the link to the photo:

> I finally got a chance to take a photograph with my phone's camera the
> pixellation that I'm seeing with the X11 fbdev driver on XVR-500. Have
> you seen anything like this before? 

http://imagebin.ca/view/4Lbe8g.html

> I'm still working on the X11 wildcatfb driver on and off, I've managed
> to get it to recognize the card and print out its details into
> Xorg.0.log but that's about it so far. 

Sorry :)
-- 
Tactical Nuclear Kittens

Re: XVR-500

[David Miller]

From: Alex Buell <alex.buell@munted.org.uk>
Date: Mon, 06 Dec 2010 00:02:48 +0000

> On Sun, 2010-11-14 at 10:42 -0800, David Miller wrote:
>> From: Alex Buell <alex.buell@munted.org.uk>
>> Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2010 13:27:30 +0000
>> 
>> > I will need to install OpenBSD on a spare disk and see how it works.
>> 
>> I think simply reading the OpenBSD sources will be less painful and
>> certainly less time consuming than doing a complete install.
>> 
>> But that's just me :-)
> 
> I finally got a chance to take a photograph with my phone's camera the
> pixellation that I'm seeing with the X11 fbdev driver on XVR-500. Have
> you seen anything like this before? 

Thanks for providing this photo, but it doesn't help in moving this
problem forward at all.

We know that the X11 fbdev driver doesn't work, we know precisely why,
(this has been explained in painful detail at least 3 times) and we
know that corruption of the pixels is expected.

Therefore you aren't providing any new information by taking a picture
of this.