As i moved a PCI Matrox G200 MMS card to a new PC a few days ago, i had to spend some time setting it up (linux 2.6.0 + xfree-cvs 2004.01.17) - it took longer than i expected; maybe the notes below will at least save the next person trying to use these cards with XFree some time... I had to add another AGP G200 card, as the g200-mms turned out to have too slow Xv (did not handle fullsized PAL video, though i suspect the VIA pci chipset may not be innocent) and not all MMS heads are currently connected - i've mostly tested with three or two of the 4 MMS heads. - it seems the MMS card must be used as the primary VGA card in a system; the symptoms are aot framebuffer corruption (eg while dragging windows or using Xv overlay). This does not happen on all MMS heads, only on some of them (possibly the not-posted-by-BIOS-ones, but i'm not sure). Configuring the MMS card to be the primary VGA (BIOS) and using mga_hal appears to both be required to get rid of the buffer corruption. Even booting with another G200 AGP card does not work correctly. Without mga_hal: - actually setting up the MMS card almost works; the two biggest problems being the buffer corruption mentioned above and sometimes not visible hardware cursor. - the X startup time is comparable to single head (ie almost instantaneous). - the video modes are set up differently than with mga_hal; i noticed this because the screen moved partially off the lcd monitor (dozen or so lines up), didn't look what exactly changed. - some kind of memory timing is different (may or may not be related to the above); even on the AGP card there are black "dropouts" while using an Xv overlay; with mga_hal they are not there unless the pixel clock is raised further. With mga_hal: - the first time X is started it correctly sets up the primary VGA MMS head and other (AGP) g200 card; it does not correctly set up other MMS heads (1-3) -- it seems to get the video mode mostly right, but gives a blank screen with only the (hw) cursor visible on these heads. Restarting the server is required to get all heads working properly. - the first time X is started it takes a very long time to initialize; not only is it much slower than w/o mga_hal, it also seems to initialize each head several times. - (re)starting X after mga_hal has already ran once is much faster (and does not exhibit the multiple mode changes on each head), but still takes a lot of time (more than 11 seconds). - exiting X leaves the non-primary VGA heads in a messed up state, with incorrect refresh rates. Doesn't look good on both CRTs and LCDs, and i'm somewhat concerned that X could get killed for some reason while unattended and leave the monitors not properly synced for hours... - hardware cursor appears to work ok. _______________________________________________ XFree86 mailing list XFree86@xxxxxxxxxxx http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xfree86
