I have a Sun Blade 100 running the latest debian sparc release. So far, so good, the desktop is working with a usable Mate, but with slow window movement. Marco is only working in no-compositing mode, otherwise window borders are missing.
The original hardware (m64/Rage XL) is of course incapable of accelerating modern OpenGL. So far i am forced to use software emulation with the softpipe driver , but this is of course not something really usable. In other threads here there was some mentioning of using USB, SATA and IDE cards on those machines, and it was basically said that whatever the Linux kernel supports should work. So i have done some research and indeed nouveau is compiled and present on my machine. Would it be possible to install a PCI Geforce and get a fast modern accelerated desktop with SUNs? On an x86-PC this is of course working, you have only one GPU and everything is ready for it. I even have installed a modern PCIe-x1 card to a PCI slot and used the official nvidia drivers to do some cuda and gaming on it. No problems on the PCI side normally. It might take two to three seconds to transfer some textures and stuff, but from there you will not notice the difference that you are running on a PCI slot. So the next question is if it was theoretically possible to do on a SUN, how would i proceed? The integrated GPU is used during OBP and the boot process, from where the kernel could detect and initialize the PCI GPU. Then at some point i would have to tell the system that it should not use the internal GPU, but the PCI GPU with nouveau for output of virtual terminals and the desktop. Has anyone done this yet or ideas how i could configure this?
