Re: ATI FireGL4 drivers for ia64
Hi,
> Again, I'm not 100% sure, but I honestly think your best bet is to attempt
> to find a newer ATI FireGL X1 or Z1 board that fits in your machine. These
> card should be quite cheap these days, but not so old that they are
> impossible to find. If you have a zx2000, any ATI X1 or Z1 board you can
> find will work, and you can use the driver at http://r300.sf.net if you
> need hardware accelerated 3D. (From memory, this driver is now included in
> the latest X.org server sources anyway, so if you upgrade to the very
> latest X server yourself, you won't need to install a separate driver.)
I don't know how the open-source r300 driver now performs, but until
very recently, only the Linux-ia64 driver 3.2.5 from ATI (available on
the zx6000 support page) provided decent 3D hardware acceleration for
the FireGL X1 graphics adapter on the zx6000 workstation. Unfortunately,
this driver is completely outdated now. It only officially supports a
unique Linux distribution (Red Hat Linux 2.1 Advanced Workstation). You
can try a different Linux distribution, but:
- updating the open-source part of the driver to support kernel 2.6 is a
real pain; better keep with kernel 2.4
- you must recompile the open-source part of the driver using gcc 2.96
because of the Linux-ia64 binary-only libfglrx_ip.a library
- this driver only runs with XFree86 4.1.x. There's a runtime check for
this and if you try a different XFree86 version, X refuses to start and
the /var/log/XFree86.0.log file displays
[R200Setup] XFree86 version mismatch - detected 4.3.0, required 4.1.x
That's why I'm maintaining an old Debian Woody installation on my second
HDD (kernel 2.4, gcc 2.96 and XFree86 4.1.0 by default). The really
annoying thing is that the hp Itanium workstation division was
internally using a more recent ATI driver (3.7.2 rather than 3.2.5) but
it was never publicly released. By comparison with the x86 3.7.x release
notes, this driver seems to support at least XFree86 4.3.x, so Debian
Sarge could be used without a problem. I don't know if ATI has stopped
developments on the IA-64 architecture. SGI customers can however
benefit from Linux accelerated ATI drivers for the Prism workstations
sporting Itanium² CPUs and FireGL X2 or X3 graphics adapter. I've
contacted ATI and hp several times about this issue and also posted a
message on the hp ITRC forum. I second Duraid opinion: talking to ATI is
like talking to a brick wall. But talking to hp is the same.
Welcome to the wonderful world of hardware no more supported less than
three years after it has been released...
Emeric
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