Re: G550DH + G450DH Framebuffer succes & directfb question.

[Helge H. <hel...@ai...>]

Mark Hurenkamp wrote:

>Hi,
>
>
>I managed to find a couple of matrox cards (G550 dual head AGP and a G450
>dualhead PCI card), and decided to give it a go with ruby.
>I did not succeed in setting up a working dualhead X environment yet
>(although Xinerama works), but with framebuffer i have everything workingnow on kernel 2.6.5, even with modular matroxfb & fbcon drivers.
>
Did you try modular only, or did you also try compiled-in framebuffer?
I have not been able to run 2.6.3 or later, because of a divide error when
initializing the framebuffers.  I'll try modular now, to see if that 
improves
anything.

> There are
>still a few issues (I think Helge also mentioned some of them before):
>
>    * upon loading of the matroxfb drivers, all framebuffers show a garbled
>      screen.
>  
>
Fortunately, a minor problem. They are usually loaded only once.

>    * when loading fbcon, the garbled screen cleans up (mostly), but on the
>      main console I see a big white rectangle. On none of the consoles I
>      can see the login prompt, but it appears after pressing enter key :-)
>  
>
The fbcons works, they merely start out with some garbage.

>    * when switching virtual console on the main console with F1-F6 keys,
>      the framebuffer setup is somehow messed up and so the main console is
>      also shown on the second head. Rerunning the matroxset commands does
>      not help, but after rerunning my 'reset_matrox' script which also
>      uses fbset to setup the framebuffers, everything works again.
>  
>
Now this is irritating.  It seems to be tied to changing resolution or
video mode. Changing resolution in X messes up the same way.

>Since the framebuffers are working so well, I decided to try some DirectFB
>applications (would like to run freevo or mythtv on my TV and try
>the XDirectFB server), however, they don't seem to like ruby because I keep
>getting the following error with every application I try to start:
>
>(!) DirectFB/FBDev/vt: FBIOGET_CON2FBMAP failed!
>    --> Inappropriate ioctl for device
>
>Is there anything I can do to further investigate? Perhaps I can patch
>  
>
Try on each console, maybe this fails only on some consoles?

>ruby to add a dummy IOCTL or patch directfb in some way that the IOCTL is
>not needed anymore?
>Should I take this to the directfb mailinglist, or is it a ruby problem?
>
>The message reminds me of the old con2fbmap tool, which we don't need
>anymore since ruby takes care of console to fb mapping :-)
>
>
>Well, I'm very impressed with ruby's current state on matroxfb, so
>good work guys!
>
>Mark.
>
>
>P.S.
>Did any of you have any success setting up dual independent (accelerated) X
>servers on the G550? I'm very interested to see your XF86Config!
>
>  
>
I haven't researched this more, but I once ran two accelerated
servers simultaneously.  (Both on the same screen though, but
that's a minor point - clever use of xinerama and or "screen 1"
should make it possible to get on separate screens)

The G550 with two accelerated X servers is fine as long as
you use ordinary 2D.   Run a 3D program on one server and
the other mostly freeze waiting for the 3D stuff to stop.
Two 3D programs simultaneously on separate xservers fail,
the second one simply segfaults.  All this may change with
newer xservers or newer DRI. My attempt was a few months ago.

Helge Hafting