Re: Future of Ruby: head for the hills

[Erik W. <om...@vc...>]

Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote:
> The problems with multiple VGA cards, etc, are much
> harder to solve, though. 

Tell me about it.  3+ solid weeks and no go.

I've traced the problem with my system down to DPMS, where the Radeon
driver thinks it's waking up the display (confirmed with initial
instrumentation of the driver), but it never does.  Unfortunately the
hardware is being packed up in 1 hour and gets on the plane to Bolivia
at 7:15am tomorrow morning, so I just bought hardware for 4 more
separate computers that we'll try to find space for in our crates.

OTOH, I've been running the core machine with just one video card and X
server for the last few hours while I was "shopping", and came back to
an X display that wouldn't wake up either.  The only unusual setting in
the xorg.conf appears to be VGAAccess "false", which is required for the
multi-head configuration to work without the servers crushing each other.

I've just removed the VGAAccess option from the server and started it
up, we'll see if it goes to sleep permanently as well.  If so,
something's wrong with this particular combination of driver and card,
relative to DPMS.  If not, then I've narrowed the problem down a little
bit more, except that I don't see any obvious "VGA-class" operations in
the DPMS code, just normal Radeon register pokes.

Single-server multi-head (xinerama and not) seems to work just fine with
DPMS, but I haven't had much in the way of exhaustive testing, simply no
time at the moment.

Once I get back in 2 weeks I'll be either ordering cards or using ones
left behind (new mobos might have onboard video, haven't checked that
yet) and hammering as hard as I can on this problem.  This, and the
inability for the X server to do VGA BIOS initialization if SingleCard
is "true", seem to be the only issues remaining to getting multi-seat X
working, not counting all the misc configuration issues, and
complications with other perhipherals like sound etc.  Those come next.

I would welcome help from anyone who's interested, including the Ubuntu
multiseat guys, X and console coders, etc.  I think multi-seat systems,
if they can be made stable and easy to build, are going to be a huge
deal in less developed countries, due to cost, power, and space concerns.