From: Alex Buell <alex.buell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2010 20:47:22 +0000 >> I have a Sun Blade 2000 here with dual 1.2GHz processors, 2 x 73GB FC-AL >> disks, 4GB of RAM and a XVR-500 graphic adapter. I am quite happy with >> the machine, but for one very small problem. >> >> It seems that the XVR-500 console driver has a few problems. If I use >> the X11 fbdev 0.4.2 driver with xorg-server 1.7.7, in 8 bit colour >> depth, the X11 display looks quite corrupted. I have checked and the X11 >> server is definitely running in 8 bit depth, same as the console. I am >> using the machine in 1600 x 1280 @ 76 video mode, set from PROM. After >> exiting from X11, console gets restored normally, everything works, I >> just get a severely corrupted display - but I can move the mouse and use >> the keyboard to log in as normal. Any ideas why what might be wrong? >> >> As a temporary workaround I just log onto the Blade via GDM from my >> laptop and everything looks OK in 24bit @ 1600x1200. >> >> I cannot even get the X11 fbdev driver to start in 24 bit as the X11 >> fbdev driver fails with errors. Is it even possible to force the PROM to >> start in 24 bit depth? >> >> Perhaps I could do a nouveau and find how how the XVR-500 graphic >> adapter works? Just thinking things out here The X500 framebuffer is configured by openfirmware in a interleaved format that requires writing to two different framebuffer locations for every single pixel. That's why we need to override ->imageblit(), ->fillrect(), and ->copyarea() driver operations and can't just use the normal cfb* ones directly. Therefore the X11 fbdev driver is never going to work properly, no matter what BPP or resolution you bring up the screen. There is zero public documentation on this chipset, so yes you will need to reverse engineer everything. But you may look at the openbsd driver for some hints as they've already undertaken reverse engineering some of the chip variants. This is the graphics card I have on one of my workstations, and the ease by which I can just buy a Radeon based card with openfirmware on it tends to kill my motivation to work on this personally, it's not really a good investment of time. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe sparclinux" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
