Re: G550DH + G450DH Framebuffer succes & directfb question.

[James S. <jsi...@in...>]

> 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.

This is a bug in the mainline kernel as well. The problem is VGA text 
console is not flushing it text buffers before the framebuffer driver 
takes over and then redraw the buffer. Another problem is some framebuffer
drivers call printk while initializing. When takeover_console is called 
the printk could be called while the hardware is in the in between state 
of vga text mode and graphics mode. The console layer wants to still print 
something to the screen but the hardware is not ready for that.

>     * 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 :-)

I have seen that before. The white rectangle is the size of the earlier 
console resolution you just toke over. I see this when I go from vgacon to 
neofb with fbcon. The fbdev layer will most likely end up doing a memory 
clear out before taking over as a fix.

>     * 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.

The matrox is a funny driver. I don't think the matroxset commands where 
meant to be used with the ruby kernel.

> 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

Why is directfb call the console mapping function? That is really bad.

> 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?

I would find out why directfb is playing with con2fb ioctl.

> 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!

Me too. I like to give a demo of that.