Re: PCI 3Dfx Voodoo3 on HPPA - Is it possible?
Hi,
although you posted this question in the parisc-linux mailing list and it
was discussed/answered there, I think it is interesting to
reply to this question in the debian-hppa mailing-list aswell:
the current situation is that a Voodoo3 PCI causes a HPMC when you
try to start the X server. I'm busy right now, but I'll try to figure out
why and do a little bit debugging of this issue on the weeekend (I'm not
very deep into the internals of the HP-PA architecture and linux).
Moreover it seems that at least the XFree86 Voodoo3 driver has some
other (probably not related) problems if you stick the Voodoo3 (32bit PCI)
into a 64bit PCI slot.
Remember if you want to stick a graphics card into a C1xx or C2xx (and
probably all HP-PA machines with PCI slots) that it needs 3.3V signalling
support. Not many graphic cards do 3.3V signalling. (I hope I didn't mixed
up 5V signalling with 3.3V signalling).
Moreover most graphics card require to be initialised by a PC BIOS (using
ix86 instructions). For that reason XFree86 comes with a small Intel
emulator that does the initialisation on non-Intel architectures.
The linux kernel does not do this and the Linux Framebuffer device drivers
for Voodoo,Radeon, Nvidia etc. won't work on non-Intel architectures for
that reason (unless a graphics card can and is initialised by some
other method not involving/requiring a PC BIOS. These cards are rather
rare and usually older graphics cards or plain framebuffers).
Some people try to get Voodoo2 running on a C2xx because this kind of card
is one of the exceptions mentioned above: it doesn't need to be
initialised by the BIOS, you can use glide for that (which is available
for linux).
So far I'm not aware of any other graphics card than HP's that run on
Linux/PA-RISC. Feel free to reply to this post if you have more
information on this topic or actually run a machine with a non-HP card!
greetings max
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