Colby, See: http://blogs.sun.com/alanc/entry/xorg_for_solaris_sparc#comments "Drivers for UPA cards like Creator (ffb) and Elite3D (afb) probably won't be ported by Sun. Someone who is interested may be able to port the support from BSD or Linux. For PCI cards based on the ATI chips (PGX, PGX-24, PGX-64, XVR-100), we may be able to leverage the x86 Xorg ATI drivers, but have not yet determined if we can or will do so. Right now, XVR-2500 is the only card with Xorg plans set, with the rest to be determined. Posted by Alan Coopersmith on February 16, 2006 at 04:32 PM PST #"
Well, that was well over 22 months ago and Xorg 7.3 is released. Now read this periodical releasting to a RoHS ruling: http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/indiana-discuss/2007-June/001373.html "For SPARC though, given the limited resources still working on SPARC graphics, they've agreed only to port the devices still sold by Sun today - and thanks to the purge of cards that didn't comply with the European & Chinese Reduction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) rules last year, that's only the XVR-300 & XVR-2500 PCI-E cards for the latest generation Ultra workstations and the XVR-100 PCI card for previous generations. (In years past, Sun designed it's own graphics cards - for SPARCs with graphics on the Sbus or UPA bus, it's got a Sun designed card - but the economics of that got to the point where Sun moved to the PCI (and later PCI-E) busses and OEM'ed graphics cards - all PCI graphics in SPARCs are OEM'ed from ATI, 3DLabs, or TechSource.)" "1) Ship existing SPARC OpenGL, with accelerated modules for existing SPARC graphics cards (closed source - and I don't know if it's redistributable) - with Xsun, this has acceleration for most of the mid-to-high end SPARC graphics cards, with Xorg, only XVR-2500 is known to have usable hardware acceleration - I don't know if the others will easily work with Xorg or not once the framework is in place. 2) Ship open source Mesa OpenGL, as we do on x86 (and virtually all other open source OS'es do), accepting that we'll have no hardware acceleration and break compatibility with existing SPARC OpenGL applications" A lot of good info - my only concern was the comment on Sun OpenGL 1.5 which was a small issue between Mesa 3D and Sun OpenGL porting a few years ago. Any legacy Sun SPARC card besides the XVR-100/300/2500 (i.e. IMHO) will most likely stay Xsun-only under Sun's current support model. Communitywise, you have to resolve the Sun OpenGL porting to Xorg as well. ~ Ken Mays This message posted from opensolaris.org
