From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: David Mosberger Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 01:29:07 +0000 Subject: Re: [Linux-ia64] Re: IA-64 XFree86 (was: XFree 4.0.1 module loading) Message-Id: List-Id: References: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-ia64@vger.kernel.org >>>>> On Mon, 21 Aug 2000 12:34:11 -0700 (PDT), Mark Vojkovich said: Mark> 1) Firmware issues that prevent the X-server from working Mark> reliably with SMP (even lspci locks up in the SAL code). As Bill already pointed out, we have seen any problems since we fixed /proc/bus/pci/devices not to overwrite kernel memory. We have a dual-CPU BigSur here which runs X fine and lspci doesn't crash the machine. The quick and dirty hack is to use 16KB page size. Mark> 2) No mechanism for the X-server to write combine memory and Mark> no discussions on adding this to Linux as far as I can tell. Mark> There needs to be a new flag to open() or mmap(). There Mark> aren't any MTRRs. I submitted a patch for the tdfx DRM module to map non-AGP stuff as write-combined (actually, I'm not 100% sure this is the right thing to do here; a DRM expert may want to double check this; it does seem to work fine on my machine). See the latest Linux kernel patch. Linus already agreed that it would be OK to add additional mmap() flags to indicate the memory attribute (normal vs. write-combine vs. uncached). Walt says a patch to do this was developed as part of the XFree86 4.0 work at VA and promised to send me a patch. I don't think I have received such a patch, but I'd be happy to merge it in. ;-) Mark> 3) The bios not assigning interrupts to cards that need them. Mark> My A3 machine will not boot with an NVIDIA card in it for this Mark> reason. Can't help with this. --david