Using S3's Savage drivers
Hi, I've been running S3's Savage driver (version 1.1.18 S3) for the last few days. I've been using a somewhat hackish setup, using - the 2D driver within a current CVS HEAD server; - the kernel module built from 4.2.0 sources and a heavily patched 2.4.18 kernel; - the 3D driver built from 4.2.0 sources but used with a 4.2.1 copy of Mesa (actually Debian's 4.2.1-6). I've got no idea whether the bugs I've encountered are due to my weird setup, or to S3's code. The hardware is a Savage Twister-K and a 950 MHz Duron. Nothing to say about 2D or Xv -- in normal usage, both appear to be as fast and stable as recent versions of Tim's driver. I didn't try to make XvMC work. At least on my setup, direct OpenGL is not ready for general usage. The most striking problem is that glBitmap and glDrawPixels (and hence glXUseXFont) are broken (glBitmap appears to do nothing, and glDrawPixels draws stuff at half the y coordinate). Hence, all applications and some games fail to show any text at all. (Most games appear to use textures for text.) The accumulation buffer appears to be broken too. While I haven't managed to make the system crash, it is quite easy to make the X server deadlock (having two threads do intensive OpenGL works every time). In all cases, I could reboot the machine remotely. Juliusz ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 12:25:16PM +0200, Sven Luther wrote: No, there you are exagerating. I hardly doubt that they would go broke or whatever if they released open source drivers. If anything, they would sell more boards. Not very many, and their competitirs would then have access to all their IP, so could out-do them in the next generation of cards. -- Daniel Stone [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.kde.org - http://www.debian.org - http://www.xwin.org Configurability is always the best choice when it's pretty simple to implement -- Havoc Pennington, gnome-list pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Mark Vojkovich wrote: On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Tim Roberts wrote: On 18 Jul 2003 20:16:35 -0500, William Suetholz wrote: In business terms, the Linux market is not relevant. Sad but true. For consumer desktop that's true. There is one potential business case in the professional desktop market. SGI's, HP's and Sun's old workstation customers have been moving over to Linux. All the film studios are using Linux, for instance. The volume is small but the margins on the professional cards is high so there is a chance that it might actually make money some day. If it weren't for this potential in the professional market, NVIDIA probably wouldn't have any binary Linux drivers. The real target of those drivers is the NVIDIA Quadro line not the GeForce line. If the server market is the biggest (and for Linux it is) then only 2D support if that is required. I'd bet even the big film studios don't use Linux to view the final rendering. They probably use a Mac (Apple OS of some kind) or a PC running Windows. Fred Error Loading Explorer.exe You must reinstall Windows. ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
Am Sam, 2003-07-19 um 17.52 schrieb Fred Heitkamp: On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Mark Vojkovich wrote: On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Tim Roberts wrote: On 18 Jul 2003 20:16:35 -0500, William Suetholz wrote: In business terms, the Linux market is not relevant. Sad but true. For consumer desktop that's true. There is one potential business case in the professional desktop market. SGI's, HP's and Sun's old workstation customers have been moving over to Linux. All the film studios are using Linux, for instance. The volume is small but the margins on the professional cards is high so there is a chance that it might actually make money some day. If it weren't for this potential in the professional market, NVIDIA probably wouldn't have any binary Linux drivers. The real target of those drivers is the NVIDIA Quadro line not the GeForce line. If the server market is the biggest (and for Linux it is) then only 2D support if that is required. I'd bet even the big film studios don't use Linux to view the final rendering. They probably use a Mac (Apple OS of some kind) or a PC running Windows. Not completely true, I'm afraid. At GUADEC this year there was a quite interesting talk by some guy who could indeed proove that many film studios replaced not only the rendering farms by Linux clusters (that was quite early) but also the quite expensive editing workstations, namely the good old SGI workstations. The calculation is clear, more value at less cost. And since they use specialised software anyway it was no problem for them to have it ported to Linux. So my impression is that in certain areas we are already moving into new niches which demand solutions that are hard to provide, like 3D rendering. The problem is that neither the hardware manufacturers nor the software developers (us) get to know these demands. You only get to know some small percentage of the decisions made but you are (mostly) not involved in the decision making process. This is mostly done by business people who are told the feature requirements. And those then go and look for those features at the lowest price. They will not subscribe to xfree86-devel mailinglist and ask for a feature. If it is not there, they simply will not buy it. And they will also not ask ATI or whoever to provide this feature. Fred CU nils faerber -- kernel concepts Tel: +49-271-771091-12 Dreisbachstr. 24 Fax: +49-271-771091-19 D-57250 Netphen D1 : +49-170-2729106 -- ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
On Sat, Jul 19, 2003 at 11:52:47AM -0400, Fred Heitkamp wrote: If the server market is the biggest (and for Linux it is) then only 2D support if that is required. I'd bet even the big film studios don't use Linux to view the final rendering. They probably use a Mac (Apple OS of some kind) or a PC running Windows. The digital effects and animation studios are typically using Linux workstations, often migrated from SGI. They have some Windows/Mac for specific apps sometimes, and some leftover UNIX workstations sometimes. It's not just the render farm though. See here for example: http://www.movieeditor.com/pubs/gu4dec.rowe.monday.abridged.pdf Havoc ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
On 19 Jul, Havoc Pennington wrote: On Sat, Jul 19, 2003 at 11:52:47AM -0400, Fred Heitkamp wrote: If the server market is the biggest (and for Linux it is) then only 2D support if that is required. I'd bet even the big film studios don't use Linux to view the final rendering. They probably use a Mac (Apple OS of some kind) or a PC running Windows. The digital effects and animation studios are typically using Linux workstations, often migrated from SGI. They have some Windows/Mac for specific apps sometimes, and some leftover UNIX workstations sometimes. It's not just the render farm though. See here for example: http://www.movieeditor.com/pubs/gu4dec.rowe.monday.abridged.pdf Excellent examples of how far Linux has gone in taking over movie production, but it missed a couple points: 1) Mr. Heitkamp said view the final render. I would interpret this to mean the final film production work done on an Avid or similar system. So far, these systems remain Mac or Windows based. But Avid is hiring people with Linux experience and has released a few tools for Linux. The Linux penetration is coming. 2) This final view does not need 3D. The 3D graphics pipeline may be of interest in some of the earlier stages, but not in the final stages. And, in the earlier stages the really good rendering is not done with 3D graphics cards. You use the 3D tools for the preliminary sketches. 3) The final view needs tools that are special, and rarely available from traditional PC vendors. What you really need are very high quality display chains, preferably 12-bit resolution from frame buffer out to display (with no loss of quality or noise). You need extremely fast update and modify to the frame buffer so that you can rapidly adjust things like color balance, create psuedo-spotlights, and selectively adjust the appearance of subsections of the frame. The XFree86 2D capabilities and 2D image optimizations are actually quite relevant to these needs. They can't be used directly, but that is just because all the readily available cards are limited to 8-bits. R Horn ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Solution for 855GM video memory issue
Hi, PLEASE CC any answers to [EMAIL PROTECTED] as I'm not subscribed to the list. first, my problem as summarized by David H. Dawes: It appears that some 855GM-based laptops only pre-allocate 1MB of video memory, and don't provide any BIOS configuration options for increasing this. Although the XFree86 driver will allocate more (if the correct agpgart kernel support is present), the mechanism used to inform the video BIOS of the additional allocation doesn't seem to be implemented on these laptops. This results in the video BIOS refusing to program video modes that require more than 1MB (actually 832KB). As far as I know there hasn't been any solution for this. So I spent my day digging through Intel datasheets and disassembling the Video BIOS and came up with a hack that works for me: The Video BIOS stores the memory size it thinks it is allocated at a certain location in RAM. This location is write-protected by default but can me made writable by setting the appropiate chipset registers. That's what I do and then I can set the memory size so XFree86 works with higher resolutions and color depths. Since I don't have the XFree86 sources to patch, I implemented this hack in a separate program called 855patch. It takes the desired video memory size in KB as argument. Note that it only tells the BIOS what memory size to expect but does NOT actually allocate the memory. So you'll have to set the VideoRAM option in the XF86Config Device section to at least the size you used when calling 855patch (more is fine) or your system will probably crash. The hack works nicely on my Dell Inspiron 500m laptop (Intel Video BIOS version 2945) and the mechanism I described is also implemented in version 2973 I downloaded from Intel.com. So I suggest you try it, if you have the problem described above. I'd be very glad if this snippet - if it works on other systems - found it's way to XFree86 sources. Disclaimer: Obviously I can't guarantee that it'll work for you. So don't blame me if something bad happens. Download: http://www.chzsoft.com.ar/855patch.c Christian Zietz, now able to run XFree86 in 1024x768x16bpp ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
On Sat, 19 Jul 2003, Fred Heitkamp wrote: On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Mark Vojkovich wrote: On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Tim Roberts wrote: On 18 Jul 2003 20:16:35 -0500, William Suetholz wrote: In business terms, the Linux market is not relevant. Sad but true. For consumer desktop that's true. There is one potential business case in the professional desktop market. SGI's, HP's and Sun's old workstation customers have been moving over to Linux. All the film studios are using Linux, for instance. The volume is small but the margins on the professional cards is high so there is a chance that it might actually make money some day. If it weren't for this potential in the professional market, NVIDIA probably wouldn't have any binary Linux drivers. The real target of those drivers is the NVIDIA Quadro line not the GeForce line. If the server market is the biggest (and for Linux it is) then only 2D support if that is required. I'd bet even the big film studios don't use Linux to view the final rendering. They probably use a Mac (Apple OS of some kind) or a PC running Windows. Digital context creation (DCC) for most movies is done on Linux workstations running in-house software or commercial software such as Maya, SoftImage, Shake, Houdini. Final rendering is done on server farms which are largely Linux. Post production is still done primarily on big SGI machines. That will move over to Linux when PCs go 64 bit, provided the professional X desktop environment isn't fucked up by bells and whistles by then. It's not clear if Longhorn is going to be very DCC/CAD friendly so that may prompt some minor defections from Windows to Linux. It may be that Microsoft will alienate the professional market in order to better cater to the consumer market. Unfortunately, I detect a similar willingness in the Linux community. Mark. ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
RE: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Mark Vojkovich wrote: For consumer desktop that's true. There is one potential business case in the professional desktop market. SGI's, HP's and Sun's old workstation customers have been moving over to Linux. Thats no market secret to anyone at all. You just have to browse for the leading application software vendors and then admit that any big tool in the digital content creation business is availabel in a Linux port as well. Lets say non of the PC big vendors want to miss those business and therefore would run havoc if their requirements to grafics vendors for their hardware and drivers would lack the Linux OS support. Obviousely the intel compatible PC architecture is the toy of choice. All the film studios are using Linux, for instance. The volume is small but the margins on the professional cards is high so there is a chance that it might actually make money some day. If it weren't for this potential in the professional market, NVIDIA probably wouldn't have any binary Linux drivers. The real target of those drivers is the NVIDIA Quadro line not the GeForce line. or alternatively an ATI FireGL board but not the ATI Radeon. its the same market situation for them so there cant be much difference. whoever looks back on the driver history can easily verify this sort of reasoning the driver bring up. From: Fred Heitkamp [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] If the server market is the biggest (and for Linux it is) then only 2D support if that is required. I'd bet even the big film studios don't use Linux to view the final rendering. They probably use a Mac (Apple OS of some kind) or a PC running Windows. It is NOT the server market, it is the grafics render farming and the related grafics editing at the desks of the movie industry. Ehm, why should movie industry not use all in the same OS flavour when they know that it pays out for them. And admin is much luckier when anything behaves the same instead of having a multi OS installation. A department must have strong needs to convince an Admin to make such sort of an excemption, or it must cancel any calls to the IT admin if it installs that system without his explicit approval. Hey, what do you think how final film rendering is done for digial movie industry? They do have the films on some sort of fast and high volume media in order to provide a high quality result. Such digital data is best stored on SCSI-RAID systems with bus adapters that grant the needed troughput. Maybe even some two or three of 64 bit PCI adapters are needed and a RAID array with some 5 to 8 disks, each with 100 GB volume, per adapter. -- I have seen Windows administrators going mad when they just started putting a 2nd SCSI controller into the same PC. Linux simply does it and comes with RAID for no cost. Then there must be some core unit, possibly a long term established 64 bit CPU or whatever 32 bit i686 design is capable of managing the system data flow fast enough. -- I am not really aware of Windows supporting anything but the i686 at high speeds, so there is an important limit on choices. Linux supports nearly any sort of speedy CPU, so its a nice guy. Goint to grafics, there might be even enoug bus transfer performance for the good old Hercules Dynamite 128, but of course some current boards might perform better. Its just that movie creation devices might need fine tuned video modes in color depth and resolution. Possibly the adaption to 10 bits or 12 bits per component formats is simpler if the system can be freely programmed. -- Windows does not let you tweak video modes that much. Linux offers open source and lets you customize nearly anything. Such a box must use a nearly invisible system activity footprint to not intercept any of the time critical movie data streaming. Further a windowing system is not really needed whilst streaming, its enough if the framebuffer gets initialized and some sort of remote hardware control for the image engraving is doable. -- Windows comes with a quite heavy memory foot print and a big bunch of running threads, even when in rescue console mode. Its uncertain how viable that console is for possbily multi cpu operation or whatever feature you might need for the project. You do need a big bunch of costly tools to write Windows drivers, even if you only want to access a certain IO-Port. Linux is easily reducible to some 100 kB of kernel with only the components in there that are really urgently needed. You have quite a number of choices how to operate your grafics. If you thinkg you do want some IO-Port access, then just patch it. In the end - why setup such a machine with something you cant control whilst you have anythin you need to your hands at no cost and tested on your remaining infrastructure? Thats the considerations that are attaching to a current film rendering system project. There might have been prior
RE: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
On Sun, 20 Jul 2003, Alexander Stohr wrote: On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Mark Vojkovich wrote: From: Fred Heitkamp [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] If the server market is the biggest (and for Linux it is) then only 2D support if that is required. I'd bet even the big film studios don't use Linux to view the final rendering. They probably use a Mac (Apple OS of some kind) or a PC running Windows. It is NOT the server market, it is the grafics render farming and the related grafics editing at the desks of the movie industry. I honestly don't know for a fact that the server market is bigger than the movie renderfarm market. I am just speculating that it is base on casual reading of trade websites and periodicals. Just because there are more general internet using businesses than movie businesses. Servers don't need high performance 3D or 2D graphics. In fact many servers are probably not administered with a GUI at all. I don't know how many CAD/CAM applications are done using Linux either, but probably much less than Windows and Solaris/SGI. I am not trying to argue against high performance and complete ATI or Nvidia opensource drivers. I was just playing devils advocate. Linux is my favorite OS. It would be perfect for me if the graphics and multimedia capabilities were equal or better than Windows. Fred Error Loading Explorer.exe You must reinstall Windows. ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
RE: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
From: William Suetholz [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Mr. Harris, yes I am one of Those people who want a device to work in my chosen operating system, /me wants Commodore 64 - BASIC BIOS 2.0 support, call it my favorite! Cool machine, boots in 2 seconds to a fully useable prompt. It must be an important platform therefore. Really, i dont lie. and have been frustrated that while things have gotten a bit better than they were in 1998, the OS and users that use it are still considered second class by the device manufactureres despite some very quiet lip service on the manufacturers part. Nope, its rather Win XP, Win 2000, Win ME, Win 9x, Win NT 4.0 and then comes the Apple platform. I dont want to count, but since my C64 was sold more than a million units i think its more important than your platform. *guessing* I still am not able to use the DVD playback acceleration features, because the chopped that out of the docs. Then it must be something that is called intellectual property that those vendor dont want to expose to other parties since it is either valueable by its design or a unit with rights pending from others that have charged money for giving it away on a per unit base or other license sheme. I dont know. Not entirely true.. I have gotten support from ATI in getting their stuff to work under NT and other MS systems. Seems their sales do include a support fee for the meintioned platform. But they cant charge you a support fee for already sold boards. Or can you give me an idea how that could work? On the other hand.. If more people who didn't want to have to run another OS to access features that are not well supported because of lack of knowledge on how to support them would comment/complain (oh alright -BITCH-) maybe the hardware vendors would realize that there is a viable market for their devices to be used on the second class OS's Hmm, someone else explained quite interestingly why a 1000:1 number of users is a good reason for considering them as an UN-important amount. And, I'm sure that ATI has a file on me :-) I've been commenting on this directly to them for some time. Lets see how long it takes to accumulate enough for such comments to improve the situation to your total pleasence. Its only the very last resort of DVD decoding accelleartion support, got it right? Yes I am a random person, and, I'm a nobody who must be a pretty terrible person to want to use something other than a MS supported product to utilize the features that the card was purchased for. And, I must never (in the 5-7 years I've been asking for this) have thought about the business side of things. You know its the vendors decision what he providew with the product. And it was your decision to accept that product for your targets. Maybe there was really no better choice at that moment for you. But you got miscs commitments over the years which significantly did improve your situation - there was really no strong base (like a sales promise) for that vendor that urged him to perform like that. I would call that a rather friendly act or better a gift. Didnt you like that sort of gift? Would you be happier if its withdrawn? I would actually be satisfied with Binary only drivers that would support the whole card. But, there aren't enough people letting them know that there is an interest (OOPS that would be BITCHING!). Its becoming nearly a habit for you. *gg* Dont you think the OpenSource programmers could understand that sort of speech in a non friendly as well? i think they dont have problems in that sort of co-existance. its merely that some Linux users always switch between those two worlds all the time when in a bashing mood. XFree86 has an interest in the drivers that have been forked into other projects. And, the group has a working relationship with the vendors in question, which means that such concerns can be expressed in places that will result in the best possible result. Rather than Random people (never call them customers) that use the vendors hardware can use the hardware in a manner befitting the quality of the hardware's design. If you do pay enough for it then you can have nearly anything. At least thats the idea that a comercial facility does work. As there is not that much money involved in OpenSource there is a basic problem in interacting with such facilities. Other developers have expressed at some time that they got best results of responseness in cases where the money factor did not hit big into a case. This means if either it was a relatively small effort compared to the other operations or in cases where the copmany already knew that there was no chance to get any more money from a specific still alive component and so had no more reason to hide anything. One thing, you might know that companies with no longer existing business tend to behave like they are no longer existing - having no money does mean there is no
