Date: Sat, 03 Nov 2012 13:51:52 -0700 From: "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg@tristatelogic.com> To: Niclas Zeising <zeising@freebsd.org> Cc: freebsd-x11@freebsd.org Subject: Re: r300-based boards... Are they now officially a lost cause? Message-ID: <96984.1351975912@tristatelogic.com> In-Reply-To: <5094EE9F.70806@freebsd.org>
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In message <5094EE9F.70806@freebsd.org>,
Niclas Zeising <zeising@freebsd.org> wrote:
>To try to answer some of your questions...
>The FreeBSD x11 team is currently only two members that work in it
>regularly. It is a big beast, and it grows more and more Linux-isms
>every day, making porting increasingly harder every day. The Linux
>people have a tendency to break APIs and KPIs every now and again, just
>to make porting hard.
I sort-of knew (or rather had read) about the Linux-isms problem, but I
did not realize that only two people work on x11-related stuff for FreeBSD.
I can definitely understand how you guys would have your hands full!
(You could in theory just "freeze" all x11-related stuff at some
working state/level, but then, obviously, there would be a growing
outcry, over time, about lack of support for the many _new_ graphics
cards that seem to arrive on a regular basis.)
>The reason that mesa hasn't been updated to the
>8.0 branch in the ports tree is that this would kill support for
>numerous legacy graphics cards, and this would probably raise an outcry
>from many, at least in the past that has been the case when something in
>x11 land changes or breaks.
Yes. I read some online material about this last night. There was some-
thing someone had written about sheding support for many drivers for
ancient cards. I assume that happened, but I think that what I read
said that r300 was just barely above the cutoff level.
>There is also a distinct lack of hardware, at least on my part, so I
>can't test every graphics card under the sun to see if it still works.
Well, as I said, I'll be happy to send you an r300-based card if that
would be of any help. In fact I already have one for you! Just send
me your shipping address and I'll mail it to you. (Recently, I foolishly
purchased an X800SE card off eBay, hoping that this might solve some
of the problems, but when it arived it proved useless to me because
for some reason it refuses to dispal any of the BIOS boot-up/POST
messages. It is just fine however once some real operating system is
booted. I'd be happy to just give you this card... not a loan, a gift...
because it is nothing but a doorstop for me, and it was so inexpensive
that it was not even worth shipping back for a refund.)
>With that said, have you tried the newer xorg distribution, by setting
>WITH_NEW_XORG=yes in /etc/make.conf and recompile all xorg related
>ports? Does it work?
No. I didn't know this was an option! (Am I currently using "old"
xorg??)
Question: How can I know which things are and are not "xorg related ports"?
Will the following command sequence give me a complete list?
pkg_info | fgrep xorg | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -n 1 pkg_info -r
>Even better, can you also try the experimental
>ports repository, and see if that works?
If I knew the first thing about it, then I might be able to give it a try.
But this is the first time I have ever even heard of such a thing.
>The latter will also give you mesa 8.0.
I have no particular reason to believe that the SIGSEGV problem will be
resolved by a newer Mesa release. After all, I've seen the problem now
on both 7.4.4 and also 7.6.1. But it is worth a try, I suppose.
>More information can be found here: http://wiki.freebsd.org/Xorg
OK. I will have to ask you more about this off-list.
>With regards to gallium, I suggest you use google to find more
>information.
I did (already).
But some of the stuff I found seemed to make no sense... at least to me.
>Perhaps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium3D will give
>you some clues?
I read that already, but was not able to understand much of it. (As I said,
I am not at all a graphics guy.)
But I am re-reading it now...
So, um, if I understand correctly "Mesa" currently contains:
1) code to implement an API called "Mesa3d", and...
2) code to implement a rather different API called "Gallium3D"
Is that correct? (Assuming so, it really _is_ a bit confusing to someone
like me who is approaching all this stuff "cold", with no prior knowledge
about any of this stuff.)
So as far as applications go, they can elect to use one or the other API,
right? I guess that the information (specifically the stack traceback)
that I included here:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=ports/166163
does not really contain enough information to allow us to know which of these
two possible APIs the gthumb application is actually using, right?
Regards,
rfg
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