radeonfb on pegasos powerpc motherboard and X endianess problem

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

Hello,

I finally have a working pegasos motherboard as well as a working kernel
with a 1.6 radeonfb. I have also installed Daniel Stone's X 4.3.0
debian/sid packages, and notice the following :

  1) radeonfb works fine in 8bpp and 32bpp but depth 15 and 16 only give
  me some very dark grey.

  2) when running X with the UseFBDev option the colors are bad, i guess
  it is an endianess problem. (with and without accel)

  3) When running X without the UseFBDev option, the colors are good,
  but i get garbage when i return to the console. Not exactly garbage,
  at first it is ok, but when i enter a line or somehow pan the screen,
  the corruption start. Doing a vt switch and back redraws a clean
  screen.

So, i think something is wrong. The kernel was forked around the
2.4.18-rc4 time in a messy way, i am actually working on bringing the
patch in sync with the newer ppc trees. Matroxfb also had problems and
Petr told me that it probably was an endianess issue back then. I am
using a Radeon 9000 board.

So, since this is a pegasos, based on the pop specification, which in
turn are related to the chrp ones, and i was told that most chrp
motherboard did endianess inversion in the northbridge or something
such, and i believe that the pegasos doesn't do so, is it possible that
this is the cause, and that XFree86 know how to program the graphic card
to do endianess conversion, and fbdev knows not, or maybe that the
XFree86 radeon driver doesn't know how to act exactly and accidentally
reverts the endianess conversion or something such.

Using the fbdev driver in xfree86, i get a seemingly working X, but the
background X image is yellowish and the mode is not set correctly it is
correct, but the image is a bit smaller than the screen, and centered or
moved to the right.

Does someone know with more exactitude what the situation is exactly
with regard the kernel and endianess conversion with the different
powerpc subarches.

Friendly,

Sven Luther


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