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

[MG <marcogb@xs4all.nl>]

Dear Émeric,

Excuse me once more, for the long delay.  The period before the
Christmas break/vacation is usually very work-intensive, as far
as university work goes.

I have also not been able to try out any Linux IA-64, but I am
still *very* interested; especially after the progress you have
reported and your very kind and patient help.


On 6-11-2011 18:09, Émeric Maschino wrote:
> No problem. I didn't know that there was an ia64 port of OpenVMS.
> Did you get 3D hardware acceleration with this?

Yes, there is!  It's called HP OpenVMS I64, or OpenVMS Integrity
and internally it's also referred to as: "Industry Standard 64
operating system".  It works great, I ran it on my rx2600's and
I run it daily on my rx2620's.

What kind of IA-64 systems do you have?  One, or the one, you spoke
of was an HP zx6000 (zx1-based), correct?  VMS runs on it, it even
identifies the zx6000 as such in "$ SHOW SYSTEM /NOPROCESSES /FULL"
and in the SDA.

There's 3D acceleration, but there aren't many graphics adapters
supported.  At the moment I have AMD/ATi Radeon 7000 and 7500
cards in them, where the latter support "Open3D" (VMS' OpenGL
implementation, which used to be a licensed feature for sometime,
like during the DEC FireStorm graphics hardware era).


> 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).

Excellent!  That's very motivating.


> 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).

That sounds good.


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

Are the boot loader (ELILO) and CD/DVD detection issues at least
resolved now, in the meantime?  I remember I had to perform some
rather clumsy tricks to get the boot loader installed correctly.
(You may remember that from previous correspondence.)


> I've noticed that the netinst CD-ROM partition layout is quite
> different between Squeeze and Wheezy. Could this be the root
> problem?

No idea, but I'll definitely keep that in mind and pay special
attention to that.

I have a U320 disk in my DS2100 enclosure, specially for Linux.
So, I hope to conveniently try things out soon.


> However, you can upgrade to Wheezy from a running Squeeze install.

I usually shy away from upgrades, especially full, distribution,
upgrades.  I remember having broken the system several times, if
not due to carelessness on my part...

Maybe it's an idea to just go with the "testing" or "unstable"
version this time?


> 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.

Excellent.


> BUT! Don't upgrade the following packages:
>
> [...]
>
> Hope this helps,

Yes, it most definitely does!  I'll keep that in mind.



Kind regards,

Marco