Re: G550DH + G450DH Framebuffer succes & directfb question.

[Aivils <ai...@un...>]

On Thursday 13 May 2004 10:56, Mark Hurenkamp wrote:
> 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. 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.
>     * 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 :-)
>     * 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.

Unfortunately i do not understand how hard is fb support,
when i add fbcon. Each fb low level driver slightly differs.
Seems, matrox fb is spiteful.

> 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
> 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?

pure 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 :-)

con2fbmap is to match complicated for current linux-ruby. In abstract
user may use con2fbmap on 3 head (or more) system, when 1st user
uses 2 heads and 2nd user uses 1 head.
Current i agree more simple solution , when each user uses 1 video card
(or head - matrox case), 1 keyboard.
I will revert back original linux con2fb code. Then con2fbmap does dummy
IOCTL, compatible with linus-tree :)

How sane is moving con2fb[ ] array to VT structure ?
Existence of con2fb[ ] breaks all automatic created links between
TTY and fbdev.

Aivils