State of pm3fb driver

State of pm3fb driver

[Thomas Jahns]

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Hello,

after I was quite unhappy with the support for my ATI Mach64 adapter in  
my Powermac 7500 I aquired a Formac Proformance III adapter that  
supposedly uses a Permedia 3 chip. Unfortunately it seems that the  
driver is broken in kernel 2.6.8 (at least to my incomplete  
understanding of the subject) for the following reasons:

a) drivers/video/pm3fb.c uses a number of includes no more present
	(I could fix that as shown in the attached patch)
b) even if I fixed the compile time errors the resulting kernel does  
not display anything to the console (but works without problems  
otherwise). Also the kernel log is flooded with repetitions of the  
following line (but that might have other reasons, because I noticed it  
also happens when I boot an older kernel without the pm3 driver:
IN from bad port 64 at c01a22a

c) drivers/video/pm3fb.c and include/video/pm3fb.h contain a number of  
#ifdef statements that check for KERNEL_2_2 and similar vars, but never  
for KERNEL_2_6. So I assume the source has not seen any maintainance in  
2.6?

The card identifies itself as follows in lspci -v -s 00:0e.0:

0000:00:0e.0 Display controller: 3DLabs GLINT R3 (rev 01)
        Subsystem: 3DLabs GLINT R3
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 24
        Memory at 80880000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=128K]
        Memory at 84000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=64M]
        Memory at 90000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=64M]
        I/O ports at 0800 [disabled] [size=16]
        Expansion ROM at 80840000 [disabled] [size=64K]
        Capabilities: <available only to root>

Any comments what I should try from here?

Ciao, Thomas Jahns
-- 
"Computers are good at following instructions,
 but not at reading your mind."
D. E. Knuth, The TeXbook, Addison-Wesley 1984, 1986, 1996, p. 9

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--- /tmp/kernel-source-2.6.8/drivers/video/pm3fb.c	2004-08-14 07:36:32.000000000 +0200
+++ /home/tjahns/tmp/debian_stuff/kernel-compile/2.6.8/kernel-source-2.6.8/drivers/video/pm3fb.c	2004-10-03 14:15:42.000000000 +0200
@@ -68,14 +68,7 @@
 #include <linux/pci.h>
 #include <linux/ioport.h>
 
-#include <video/fbcon.h>
-#include <video/fbcon-mfb.h>
-#include <video/fbcon-cfb2.h>
-#include <video/fbcon-cfb4.h>
-#include <video/fbcon-cfb8.h>
-#include <video/fbcon-cfb16.h>
-#include <video/fbcon-cfb24.h>
-#include <video/fbcon-cfb32.h>
+#include "console/fbcon.h"
 #include <video/pm3fb.h>
 
 #include <asm/io.h>

Re: State of pm3fb driver

[Romain Dolbeau]

Thomas Jahns <Thomas.Jahns@epost.de> wrote:

> after I was quite unhappy with the support for my ATI Mach64 adapter in
> my Powermac 7500 I aquired a Formac Proformance III adapter that  
> supposedly uses a Permedia 3 chip. Unfortunately it seems that the  
> driver is broken in kernel 2.6.8 (at least to my incomplete  
> understanding of the subject) for the following reasons:

Noone ever updated pm3fb to works with 2.6.x, so as you noticed,
it doesn't work. There was a lot of changes for FB driver in 2.6.x,
so the driver is in need of a complete rewrite.

You can try using the likely working (but surely slow) offb, the generic
OpenFirmware driver. Or (down|up)grade to 2.4.x.

-- 
Romain Dolbeau


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Re: State of pm3fb driver

[Thomas Jahns]

On 10/05/04 15:01:23, Romain Dolbeau wrote:
> Noone ever updated pm3fb to works with 2.6.x, so as you noticed,
> it doesn't work. There was a lot of changes for FB driver in 2.6.x,
> so the driver is in need of a complete rewrite.

Is there a sufficiently complete description of these changes to  
"mechanically" port them to the existing driver? I'd certainly try that  
because it seems to me the changes to atyfb are just as hard to port to  
the Macintosh. I think Benjamin Herrenschmidt is working on the latter  
already but I'm unaware as to how much progress he has made.

> You can try using the likely working (but surely slow) offb, the
> generic OpenFirmware driver. Or (down|up)grade to 2.4.x.

Unfortunately offb doesn't work for me (it might be trying to use the  
builtin control graphics (which is currently at 0MB VRAM), how would I  
find out?).

Downgrading to 2.4.x isn't really an option because I want to use XFS.  
I just don't want to be stuck with control graphics for my MacOS  
installation and I also don't want to play around with the monitor  
connection because Linux supports nothing but controlfb of the  
alternatives I've tried.

Thomas Jahns
-- 
"Computers are good at following instructions,
 but not at reading your mind."
D. E. Knuth, The TeXbook, Addison-Wesley 1984, 1986, 1996, p. 9


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Re: State of pm3fb driver

[David Eger]

On Tue, Oct 05, 2004 at 09:06:04PM +0200, Thomas Jahns wrote:
> On 10/05/04 15:01:23, Romain Dolbeau wrote:
> >Noone ever updated pm3fb to works with 2.6.x, so as you noticed,
> >it doesn't work. There was a lot of changes for FB driver in 2.6.x,
> >so the driver is in need of a complete rewrite.
> 
> Is there a sufficiently complete description of these changes to  
> "mechanically" port them to the existing driver? I'd certainly try that  
> because it seems to me the changes to atyfb are just as hard to port to  
> the Macintosh. I think Benjamin Herrenschmidt is working on the latter  
> already but I'm unaware as to how much progress he has made.

Upgrading a driver from 2.4 to 2.6 is a tedious task that takes about
two weeks if you know FB sorta well.  I and Francois Romieu did this for
cirrusfb between 2.6.7 and 2.6.9;  Geert fixed the amiga bits then too, but 
there's been no testing of that code ;-)

A Pseudo-human readable description of the non-Amiga bits is at:

http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0406.2/1936.html
http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0406.3/1040.html
http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0406.3/1083.html

-dte



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