Re: Amiga and Sarge: any hope to have X working?

[Richard Zidlicky <rz@linux-m68k.org>]

On Thu, Oct 13, 2005 at 09:37:00AM +0200, Emiliano wrote:
> Alle 21:34, martedì 11 ottobre 2005, Kars de Jong ha scritto:
> > On ma, 2005-10-10 at 02:41 +0200, Emiliano wrote:
> 
> > > I'm using kernel 2.4.27-amiga as found on the first CD. I guess the
> > > "fbdev" (as set in XF86Config-4) is missing from that kernel...
> >
> > I don't think that's the case, it's always present in an m68k kernel.
> 
> I see.
> 
> > You have a 68060, and I believe the module loader in X (XFree86 or Xorg)
> > still doesn't do cache flushing, which will cause the '060 with its 8k
> > instruction cache to fail. With other CPUs (especially a '030) things
> > usually work fine even without the cache flushes because its cache gets
> > flushed all the time anyway, and the cache is tiny anyway.
> 
> Thanks for your explanation. Is there some way to turn the cache (temporarily) 
> off?

there are better workarounds;)
  - compile monolithic X server without modules, I have done
    that and it works perfectly on 68060. For a production machine
    a monolithic X server is in many cases preferable to module
    loading anyway.

  - fix module loading. Adding some cacheflush calls is really
    easy once you know where to put them.. 
> > On my HP300 (with a '040) it manages to start X about once every ten
> > times.
> 
> > Plus it's a pain to compile X.
> 
> May I help with this issue? I used to be an amiga coder, I also know basics 
> about linux programming on x86, so maybe I can give it a look...
> 
> The best thing would be a VM inside a fast linux box, or even a cross-compiler 
> on the x86.

one interesting way to speedup compiling is distcc.
   http://distcc.samba.org/

The setup is somewhat simpler than what you would have to do
for a full crosscompiler, it is also slower as preprocessing
and configure/make runs on the 680x0.

Richard