Re: What is the current state of the Octane/IP30 support?

[Stuart Longland <redhatter@gentoo.org>]

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Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Oct 2007, Kumba wrote:
>> For the most part, Impact-based systems run great.  You get X, unaccelerated,
>> no 3D, and a framebuffer.  VPro, framebuffer, but no X.  USB kinda weorks if
>                                    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> What's the reason for not having X? X doesn't support the frame buffer layout?
> 
> Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

My understanding, is there are two problems:

o VPro (and IMPACT) have its own dedicated memory separate from the
system memory, thus one cannot use fbdev to run X.  ("framebuffer"
perhaps is bad terminology)
o No-one except SGI seems to know how to load images into the video
memory using DMA.  Thus the shadowfb approach used to construct the
IMPACT X11 driver, isn't possible for VPro.

If someone could figure the latter problem out... we could have full
VPro support, including OpenGL, which would be sweet.  But apparently
this has been less than trivial to achieve.  Certainly well beyond my
limited skills. ;-)

Regards,
-- 
Stuart Longland (aka Redhatter)              .'''.
Gentoo Linux/MIPS Cobalt and Docs Developer  '.'` :
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   .'.'
http://dev.gentoo.org/~redhatter             :.'

I haven't lost my mind...
  ...it's backed up on a tape somewhere.


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