Hello,

On Sun, 18 Sep 2011 15:56:25 +0200
Michal Suchanek <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 18 September 2011 03:20, Michael <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Hello,
> 
> > Sure, I'll get there eventually ;)
> > There are some new drivers too ( for old hardware though ) which for now 
> > are kinda NetBSD-specific ( I made no real attempt to keep
> 
> > - xf86-video-crime, for the SGI O2. Register and DMA buffer mapping is 
> > NetBSD-specific and stuff like mode switching is done by the kernel driver, 
> > should be easy enough to port. The biggest 'challenge' ( if you can call it 
> > that ) on Linux would be the fact that this driver expects the framebuffer 
> > in tiled mode while Linux' kernel driver uses a trick to make it appear 
> > linear ( which the drawing engine can't deal with ). Since we use the 
> > drawing engine in the kernel as well it's always tiled and I threw out the 
> > linear hack long ago.
> 
> Is it fast enough to run at least a few xterms at decent speed?

Absolutely. Remember IRIX's winterm? That's the speed you get.
I ran KDE 3.5 on mine which wasn't anywhere near as sluggish as you'd expect 
form a 200MHz R5k ( ok, building it took forever but once that was over things 
weren't too bad )
The driver accelerates both basic colour expansion ( for xterms ) and some 
xrender ops, the latter helps KDE's perceived speed a lot ( actually, the 
reason to muck with KDE was to have a bunch of handy test cases for xrender ).

> I tried installing Debian on one of those machines once but the time
> it takes to boot is way too long. Maybe it has something to do with
> slow CPU and compressed initrd.

NetBSD boots to multiuser in about 20 seconds or so on a 200MHz R5k O2 with no 
'fast init' trickery whatsoever. I have no idea what's up with recent linux to 
slow down the boot process.

have fun
Michael
_______________________________________________
[email protected]: X.Org development
Archives: http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel
Info: http://lists.x.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg-devel

Reply via email to