Brian Cameron wrote:
> Alan:
>
>> Even if no SPARC workstation is ever sold again after the end of
>> the current UltraSPARC-IIIi line, it's not the end of the SPARC
>> desktop, nor of being able to develop and/or run SPARC desktop
>> applications.
>>
>> Other options include:
>> - Sun Rays running off a SPARC server
>> - Using X11 to remote display 2-D apps from a SPARC server to
>> another box
>> - Using VirtualGL/Sun Shared Visualization to remote display 3-D
>> renderings from a SPARC server to another box
>> - Using Transitive software to run SPARC applications on x86 boxes
>
> Isn't the main issue for Sparc OpenSolaris users the lack of Sparc
> driver support for the Xorg Xserver?
I'm not sure what that has to do with the complaint that Sun isn't
making any more SPARC workstations, but that is a problem.
> I believe Sun has spent some time writing a driver or two, but (if
> I remember correctly) the work was never really finished. Is that
> correct?
No - the XVR-2500 (kfb) driver is delivered now, and I think some
XVR-100/300 support may be here in time for 2008.11 (I'm not directly
involved, so this is a rumor, not a promise).
> If so, is there any chance that whatever code has been
> written could be shared with the external OpenSolaris community.
Unfortunately, graphics vendors are notoriously secretive, and none have
been willing to release Sun from our NDAs, so we're not allowed to share
the sources to our drivers for any recent hardware (pretty much anything
made in the past 5-7 years since Sun stopped designing our own and became
simply an OEM of graphics cards from ATI & 3DLabs - including all cards
for the PCI & PCI-Express busses).
> Perhaps it would accelerate development if we got external people
> more involved with the development? Or is the source code already
> available, and I just am not aware?
This has been discussed on xwin-discuss & indiana-discuss quite a bit.
Unfortunately, there haven't been many external people willing to work
on porting the reverse-engineered open source Xorg drivers from Linux -
Martin did a lot of work there, but left the community before the work
was integrated, and only one person (Ken Mays) has expressed interest
in picking it up.
The latest proposal Glynn & I have thought of, but I haven't actually sent
out yet is to add spec files for the reverse-engineered open source SPARC
Xorg drivers to SFE, so that they will be available in the "contrib" repo
on pkg.opensolaris.org, on the theory that a driver that can be installed
and may or may not work is better than a guaranteed failure to work by having
no driver at all - the contrib drivers will be unsupported, not included by
default, maintained by the community, and if we determine that some are working
well enough to migrate to the official/main repo, and become fully supported,
then we'll have to figure out how to deal with that.
> I also seem to remember you telling me that you had some sort of
> "dummy" Xorg driver which worked for Sparc, but was fairly slow since
> it doesn't support some Xserver extensions that would take advantage
> of any acceleration on the graphics card, or something like that.
> Is that memory correct? If so, would there be any value in sharing that
> dummy driver with people so to help development?
That driver (wsfb) came from X.Org open source, has always been open source,
and has been included in Nevada since about nv_55. It only works on some
graphics cards (m64 is the one I've used it with the most), and because it's
a dummy driver, doesn't know about any device-specific hardware acceleration,
just does all rendering in software and treats the frame buffer as an array
of pixels to write to.
--
-Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
