[cc'ed xwin-discuss, since this is mostly X related.]
rick ratta wrote:
> While I am not having an issue with "booting from the live CD" I am seeing
> the reported symptom
>
> (EE) GARTInit: Unable to open /dev/agpgart (Resource temporarily unavailable)
>
> when starting the x server. Oddly running from the CD I do not see the
> symptom, and the
> the GUI runs almost fine (the cursor intermittently becomes an "out sync"
> large square).
>
> Running the OS from disc yields a totally unsynchronized display. You know
> like when you
> are trying to "blit" an image and you have the wrong number of pixels in the
> scan line...
>
> Anyway, this new PC has a G41 Intel chipset.
> After running the detect tool, it claims that all the hardware is supported
> (except the audio)
> and reports a "series 4 intel chip set" but seems to think the driver should
> be
>
> vgatext/ i810
>
> I'm not sure this correct. I don't hink "i810" is a series 4 chip set, but
> I'm not an expert.
The "i810" Xorg driver is used for all Intel graphics starting with the i810 and
including the rest of the i8xx and i9xx series. It was renamed "intel" a year
or two ago to make this clearer - perhaps the device detect tool hasn't been
updated to reflect that. (Which version are you running by the way?)
> I thought I saw something on the web for Nevada that said support for G45 was
> in some build, and I
> expected that driver to be found, however I have no idea if the driver chosen
> also supports
> the G45 chipset.
>
> I am also confused as to why "agpgart" is involved given that the detect tool
> is looking
> for "vgatext", and there isn't an agp slot on the motherboard.
vgatext is the kernel console driver, that provides the text mode output using
VGA standard graphics operations, working on any VGA-compatible graphics card.
agpgart was originally developed for AGP, but is also used for PCI-Express, even
when the device is permanently connected, not in a PCI-E slot. It's what the
Intel graphics driver uses to have some of your system RAM reassigned for use as
it's video RAM. If it can't be loaded, then you're stuck with however much
memory the BIOS assigned as video RAM use at bootup, which may have been just
enough for it's text mode output and not high-resolution graphics mode.
> I'm new to opensolaris and it has been literally "decades" since I had any
> relationship
> with the how and why of solaris drivers. I'm also new to this version of X on
> x86 and
> am not familiar with the "configuration" file that I've been reading about. I
> vaguely
> remember the old OWdefaults, and its associated tools but I haven't found the
> equivalent
> of those tools yet.
There isn't a direct equivalent of the old tools - the Xorg server is mostly
self-configuring. You can provide a configuration file, and there is a good
gui for configuring nvidia cards that nvidia has provided. (There were some
older tools, xorgconfig and xorgcfg, but they were hard to use and out of date,
and have since been removed.)
> I don't think I can run the detect tool from the live CD runtime, but maybe
> I'll try that.
The Device Detection Utility should work fine from the LiveCD - that's one of
it's prime uses, to help determine if the hardware is supported before
installing.
--
-Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
