Re: DRM/DRI accelerated (3D) graphics?

[Émeric Maschino <emeric.maschino@gmail.com>]

Hi Marco,

> First off, excuse me for the long 'radio silence'.  I have been very busy
> with
> university and what time I spent on my IA-64 hardware was mostly with
> OpenVMS.

No problem. I didn't know that there was an ia64 port of OpenVMS. Did
you get 3D hardware acceleration with this?

> About Linux IA-64 and accelerated graphics, has there been news to report
> as of late?

Tony just asked Linus to pull various fixes and I've noticed that the
patch I've adapted to allow AGP memory binding was in the list
(http://marc.info/?l=linux-ia64&m=132026804220211&w=2).

W.r.t. 3D graphics, everything is now running fine on my side. Next
big step will probably be deeply testing forthcoming GNOME 3.0 in
Wheezy (http://www.0d.be/debian/debian-gnome-3.0-status.html). And
also report/fix unaligned accesses (e.g. Xorg, ioquake3).

But IMO, more serious issues surfaced. More below.

> I think it's perhaps best if I do a complete reinstall one of these days.
>  Are
> much of the mentioned fixes included with the "testing" distribution?  In
> other words, what would you recommend me?

Well, you simply cannot install Wheezy as-is on ia64 at this time :-(.

Indeed, I don't know if Debian Installer team is aware of this
problem, but Wheezy netinst CD-ROM simply cannot be booted: EFI fails
to load anything. I've noticed that the netinst CD-ROM partition
layout is quite different between Squeeze and Wheezy. Could this be
the root problem?

However, you can upgrade to Wheezy from a running Squeeze install.
Latest 6.0.3 netinst CD-ROM works fine (cmd64x driver issue has been
fixed). From there, simply modify /etc/apt/sources.list to point to
Wheezy and you're gone.

BUT! Don't upgrade the following packages:
- initramfs-tools: version 0.99 in Wheezy is totally broken and
generates unbootable initrd images. I've bisected the problem but
didn't get any feedback recently
(http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=638068). Stay with
initramfs-tools 0.98.8
- since initramfs-tools 0.99 cannot be installed, you're stuck with
kernel < 2.6.39. I'm currently running kernel 2.6.38
(linux-image-2.6-mckinley 2.6.38+34 and linux-image-2.6.38-2-mckinley
2.6.38-5
- lastly, don't upgrade udev > 164 otherwise you'll get nearly empty
/dev and error message at startup making system takes ~3 min. to get
login prompt (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=647825).
So, hold on udev, libudev0 and libgudev-1.0-0 164-3 (164-4 shoud also
work but never reached Wheezy).

Hope this helps,

     Émeric