Re: Xinerama Support?

Re: Xinerama Support?

[Michel Dänzer]

Michael Schmitz wrote:

> > If you only have offb for one head, you might be out of luck :(

I'll add something I forgot: Currently both heads must have the same depth for
Xinerama.


> IIRC the bus ID option is only needed if you have multiple video devices
> to choose from.

No, the X server will deactivate all video devices (it can see) which aren't
claimed. And the fbdev driver can currently only claim the device it uses with
the bus ID specified in the config file.


> If there are multiple devices, and the one using offb maps to the first
> frame buffer device, it should be possible to pass the frame buffer device
> name to the X server for the other one (in the fbdev device option,
> apparently).

Right,

	Option	"fbdev"	"/dev/fb1"

must be added in the Device Section for the second head.


> > > Is there any way to get the fbdev driver to be a bit faster?  I'm not
> > > too thrilled about having to wait 5 minutes watching the screen go gray
> > > so that I can log out.  (I'm not exagerating very much here.)
> >
> > It's a shortcoming in 4.0's brand new lowlevel framebuffer code. I've
> > reported it to the author, don't know if he's (been) working on it...
>
> What's the problem there? It's been annoying as hell, and I'd like to give
> it a try...

The new code is very slim and mostly faster with HW acceleration, but not very
optimized without yet (especially not on big endian :-/) . BTW this is about
xc/programs/Xserver/fb , the author is Keith Packard <keithp@suse.com> .


Michel


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Re: Xinerama Support?

[Kostas Gewrgiou]

On Thu, 30 Mar 2000, Michel Dδnzer wrote:

>
> > I haven't swapped over from sawmill, but the significant difference in speed
> > between the two is pretty important to me (since I'm not running a new
> > machine with accelerated X support--just an old 8500 with a Voodoo3).
>
> I also like Sawmill very much, but the tdfx driver for Voodoo3 should be very
> well accelerated - have you tried Kostas' patches to make it work?
>

  The tdfx driver won't work without PIO support for now, for my machine
i mmap the right iobase but obviously this isn't going to work in other
machines so its not on much of use for other people.

I am working in fbdev support in the tdfx driver but its not ready yet
and fbdev doesn't make this easy at all, for example if tdfxfb uses
a hw cursor the fb memory you mmap starts at an offset and you have no
way to know what this offset is, the xdriver *has* to know this to
program the command fifo :(


> > I set up two different monitors, two different "device" sections, and two
> > different "screen" sections.
>
> Sounds good to me, but then I haven't tried Xinerama yet.
>

You also need to tell the xserver which screens to use, here is what i use

Section "ServerLayout"
  Identifier "Main Layout"
  Screen "myScreen1"
  Screen "myScreen2" RightOf "myScreen1"

  InputDevice "Mouse1" "CorePointer"
  InputDevice "Keyboard1" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

>
> > However, I read on here that fbdev has to have a bus ID to work, and there
> > is none (that I'm aware of) on my internal video.
>
> Nothing about a video adapter in /proc/pci (or the output of lspci)?
>

  If the internal video doesn't isn't in /proc/pci then you have no
problem, the xserver won't detect the card so you can go away without the
BusID line.


  Kostas


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