[parisc-linux] framebuffer depth and other issues ...

[parisc-linux] framebuffer depth and other issues ...

[Nahkola Mikko]

I was wondering ... the VIS-EG is about as close to "fully supported" as 
they get, right?

Well, I have one of those in a C240 and ... well, the system is otherwise 
just fine, even KDE is fairly responsive and all that, but there's a 
shortage of available colors. (anyone know of a good lowcolor icon theme? 
I can't seem to find such in Debian... anyone?)

Is it possible to get more than 8 bpp out of a VIS-EG? How would I go 
about that, do I need to say something like "stifb:bpp:foo" to the kernel 
or is fbset enough?

How much of a difference is there between VIS-EG/PCI (A4977A) and 
VIS-EG/GSC (A4450A) in this regard? I have an A4450A in there at the 
moment.

HP-UX seems to find a whole lot of differences and such ... and I did run 
GNOME/HP-UX once on a VIS-EG/PCI without running out of colors but then 
again HP-UX does color recovery and acceleration and all that on those...


Then, is an Ati Mach64 likely to work? I mean, it should be pretty 
well-supported in i386 ... and I've heard rumors about Sun-branded 
Mach64s too, so that would point to least some models getting by without 
a PC BIOS.


Third, what's the thing with $TERM and the serial console? I have 
interesting problems with the 70096, even in vt100-emulation mode the 
Debian installer was, um, interesting. Doesn't anyone else want to use 
the HP dumb-terminal hardware with Linux?


And as an aside, how reliable is the disk stuff nowadays? Would it make 
any sense to run a file server on Linux/hppa yet? I mean, something like 
a stack of A3312As, software-RAID and NFS ... is it likely to work? How 
about performance, compared to HP-UX, for example? (yes, I'd expect HP-UX 
to be somewhat better, but by how much?)


-- 
Mikko Nahkola <mikko.nahkola@nokia.com>

Re: [parisc-linux] framebuffer depth and other issues ...

[Carlos O'Donell]

> 
> And as an aside, how reliable is the disk stuff nowadays? Would it make 
> any sense to run a file server on Linux/hppa yet? I mean, something like 
> a stack of A3312As, software-RAID and NFS ... is it likely to work? How 
> about performance, compared to HP-UX, for example? (yes, I'd expect HP-UX 
> to be somewhat better, but by how much?)
> 

I'm using/testing a C3K as an NFS fileserver for our cluster of
715/50's. A large portion of the nodes run diskless, and performance is
relatively good. Haven't run LADDIS or any other benchmarks. What do
people run these days to test NFS? If only it didn't cost an arm and a 
leg... SPEC SFS97_v3.0

c.

Re: [parisc-linux] framebuffer depth and other issues ...

[Thomas Bogendoerfer]

On Mon, Oct 28, 2002 at 01:25:52PM +0200, Nahkola Mikko wrote:
> I was wondering ... the VIS-EG is about as close to "fully supported" as 
> they get, right?

there are still 2D drawing accelerations possible, hardware cursor,
color recovery and usage of the second color map.

> Is it possible to get more than 8 bpp out of a VIS-EG?

no, VIS-EG is 8 bit color, no way to get more.

> How much of a difference is there between VIS-EG/PCI (A4977A) and 
> VIS-EG/GSC (A4450A) in this regard? I have an A4450A in there at the 
> moment.

no difference in color depth between PCI and GSC cards.

> HP-UX seems to find a whole lot of differences and such ... and I did run 
> GNOME/HP-UX once on a VIS-EG/PCI without running out of colors but then 
> again HP-UX does color recovery and acceleration and all that on those...

I guess the HP-UX Xserver uses the second color map and color recovery.
I've looked a little bit how to use the second color map and I haven't
found a simple to way to add support to XFree for it. It's a nice way
to have 256 color for the desktop and 256 independant colors for the
application with focus. Maybe some XFree86 guru could give me a hint how
to implement it.

Thomas.

-- 
Crap can work. Given enough thrust pigs will fly, but it's not necessary a
good idea.                                 [ Alexander Viro on linux-kernel ]

Re: [parisc-linux] framebuffer depth and other issues ...

[Grant Grundler]

Nahkola,
You asked alot of questions. I take a shot at one of them:

Nahkola Mikko wrote:
> And as an aside, how reliable is the disk stuff nowadays? Would it make 
> any sense to run a file server on Linux/hppa yet?

Yes. I'm running a linux http/ftp server inhouse on a B180 with 200GB disk.
It mirrors RH/SuSE/Mandrake and Debian for Cupertino site.
I have to get mrtg running again to collect stats.
Nightly updates and it's never crashed.

BTW, this box also serves as my regular desktop.

> I mean, something like 
> a stack of A3312As, software-RAID and NFS ... is it likely to work?

I don't do RAID or NFS. I mean this *is* a mirror.

> How 
> about performance, compared to HP-UX, for example? (yes, I'd expect HP-UX 
> to be somewhat better, but by how much?)

lmbench results are in the parisc-linux mail archive (lists.parisc-linux.org).
IO/FS stuff was comparable, linux context switching sucks.

grant