It is definitely supported. I can say that with extremely high degree of confidence because I am the Red Hat XFree86 maintainer, and have been for 3 years. So I very much know what hardware is supported, and have tested it and use it daily personally.
Mike,
Did you by any chance read:
http://www.mail-archive.com/xfree86@xxxxxxxxxxx/msg10053.html
where I outline a swapping problem on a machine with 128MB RAM. I realise that the standard response is, your video ram is mapped in or its client pixmaps, but I had a couple of other concerns. This is also a fairly high-volume list so questions get missed or are badly put in the first place, but I am not the only person who has some questions about this. The Irish Linux Users Group is a lug with over 800 members and a number of people with recent releases of XFree86 have been seeing high process sizes. Some of this is down to applications, some is down to video ram, but I still don't understand this fully and would appreciate some advice. As far as I know, all had RedHat9 installed and XFree86 4.3.0.
In my own case, the display adapter is the Intel 845G. In bios, this is set to use 8MB system ram I thought. In the XF86Config it is set to use 10MB, I don't know if this is vram or dram. lspci -v reports a block of memory of 128MB for this device. Is this onboard vram do you know? pmap of the X process shows a 128MB chunk of shared memory. Maybe this is the vram?
Myself and others have had our machines badly swapping with very limited setups. Bootup, log in, window manager & desktop. Swapping occurs. This is with 128MB ram.
I've gone to runlevel 3 and just started X on its own, and X and twm. Similar large process size reported by ps.
I don't understand that much about X, but one thing I was wondering is how a large X process size would interact with the kernel VM system. Does it have the capacity to cause swapping like we were seeing?
Many other people in the LUG and in the office have small process sizes for X and have no problems whatsoever. And since I bought more ram, I don't have a problem either with my desktop, but have seen large process sizes on other machines which we are putting a product on and deploying. One of these has an nvidia gforce4 MX440 so this doesn't seem to be just a graphics card ram issue.
I have done a little digging on this issue, I'm sure I have left out some important information, but I've done my best to provide it all. I'm not clear at all about how the bios setting, XF86Config setting and lspci graphics memory pieces are interacting.
Please advise!
Dermot. -- _______________________________________________ XFree86 mailing list XFree86@xxxxxxxxxxx http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xfree86
