> > Unfortunately, we just don't have the resource > within > > the SPARC graphics > > group to spend any time on all the work that is > > required to open source > > the drivers for obsolete SPARC hardware. > > After consideration, I'm really ok with that, given > the AMD/ATI opening of their graphics chips > programming specs. Who wants an 8 year old > video board when todays boards are much more > performant and have open specs. > > > We have > > barely enough resource > > to adequately support current Sun customers on the > > graphics cards that > > we OEM from AMD and Creative Labs. I have asked > those > > companies if we > > could explore open source for these drivers (their > > confidential > > information was used in providing hardware > > acceleration), but neither is > > willing, at present, to do so. > > Given the fact that AMD/ATI has opened the specs for > a > majority of their graphics chipsets (I don't know the > > extent, but the open source community doing radeon > and radeonhd appear to be doing cartwheels) which > include XVR-100 and XVR-300, seems to me this > is a no-brainer. > > Obviously, only PCI boards could be used on the > older > Sparc HW (Ultra 5/10/30/60/80/1000/2000/1500/2500) > but PCI-E would be an option for Sparc HW that > supports PCI-E. > > The obvious issue is that none of those ATI boards > have OpenBoot bios so they could not be a primary > framebuffer, so development would probably require > a supported frame buffer along with the unsupported > one. > > > > And given the fact that radeon and radeonhd are > integrated drivers, we can benefit from the > opensource > community continuing to develop these drivers > in parallel.
At a minimum, it would be great to have the FOX drivers for SPARC available in binary for the older boxen, even if in a status of "compiles, but testing and maintenance is a community issue". I think I'll try building FOX for my SB2K (for the FFB2+ aka Creator 3D series 3). It's not very impressive compared to the XVR-1000, but it's the best that can be done under Xorg at the moment for that system. And there's always the XVR-100 (which I think FOX also can drive?), but that's my last resort, since it's PCI, and an SB1K/2K only has one fast (64bit/66MHz) PCI slot (the rest being 33MHz, too slow for non-tiny video), which is being better used for a SAS controller; I'd rather use a UPA slot that's otherwise useless except for graphics. Regarding the XVR-1000, at least my request for info on that now appears on http://wikis.sun.com/display/FOSSdocs/Home as "Investigating" (has for a few weeks now, actually). We'll see... For independent (or for me, home) use, replacing an otherwise respectably fast SB2K (esp. with the screaming SAS drives added!) with an Ultra 45 (comparable config, probably $8k or so) is _not_ a viable option. I'm not ready to abandon SPARC yet, so I'm willing to build the odd thing that's not available as a binary package or tarball, but I find my patience with that sort of thing (or even porting, which is at least more interesting than fighting build problems) drops as the years go by. This message posted from opensolaris.org
