Hi, I hope you don't mind that I Cc'ed the list. I've accidentally forgotten to do so in my reply but I think we should continue this thread on the mailing-list...
Frank Mehnert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Thursday 01 August 2002 11:34, you wrote: > > Frank Mehnert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > I'm interested in the current state of the savagefb kernel driver patch. > > > Does anyone works on it? README.savagefb states that acceleration does > > > not work with the 0.4.0 version. Does that mean that the machine hangs > > > or that nothing appears at the screen? > > > > the accelerated functions simple don't seem to have any effect which > > means that the screen is not cleared and not scrolled. Fortunately > > this is harmless and acceleration can be turned off using the command > > 'fbset -accel false' which makes the 0.4.0 version of the driver > > behave like the 0.3.2 version. > > Did you test it only with Savage4 graphics cards? I'm have a Thinpad T20 > here with a Savage/IX-MX. There is another problem with the chipset of that > Thinkpad which causes me some trouble using XFree86 some months ago. The > Savage/IX-MX freezes the whole system under some strange conditions. After > many hours of debugging and talking with Tim Roberts (XFree86 Savage driver > developer) we developed a solution for that problem. I'm using the very same IBM model with the Savage/IX-MX card. > There are functions WaitForFifo and WaitForIdle which wait until the chip > is idle in some way, polling a memory mapped status register. The check of > the register leads to freeze the whole machine on very few Thinkpads under > some spare circumstances. The freeze does not happen if the status register > is shadowed into the RAM or even into the video RAM. For that reason the > ShadowStatus option was introduced into the late XFree86 savage drivers. yes, I've seen DirectFB applications freeze my hardware. I haven't tracked it down in detail but I had the impression that it happens if the command buffer fills up. It can be easily triggered by running df_dok with a longer benchmark duration (--duration 10000). For this very reason, I'm almost always using the no-hardware option to turn off acceleration on my notebook but of course I'd like to make use of the hardware capabilities. We should probably try to get a similar fix into the savage frame buffer and directfb drivers then. > That is the reason that I'm still not tested the Savage fb driver -- I'm > afraid to loose data under Linux. If you use EXT3 or another journaling filesystems and sync a lot, your data should be pretty safe. Note that you can put the sync option into your directfbrc. > Unfortunately, the directfb driver is not able to program the "new" Savage > stream engine as needed by the Savage/IX-MX. Because I not own the Savage > documentation, I had to use the slow YUY2 video mode for yuv2rgb conversion > from the XFree86 driver. yes, it would be cool to have support for the new streams engine. > So my intention is to get the documentation for the Savage Chipset from > somewhere (wrote to the EMail address at s3graphics.com -- no answer, no > no answer from Denis Kropp who seems to have the docs, too) and to improve > my driver. oh, I thought that Dok gave you the docs we have. Didn't he? > I also would like to help developing the directfb Savage driver, too. In > some weeks I have more time to setup a "crash" partition where I could test > the directfb Savage driver. I'm confident that I can help to get the directfb > driver get work -- but not in the next days because I have to put further > work into a paper which is accepted at a conference. any help is greatly appreciated. Salut, Sven -- Info: To unsubscribe send a mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe directfb-dev" as subject.
