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

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

Hi Marco,

> 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).

I'm running a hp workstation zx6000 sporting a ATI FireGL X1 AGP
graphics adapter.

I bet that you only get 2D hardware acceleration on OpenVMS with
Radeon 7000 range of hardware.

>> 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).

Since then, stability issues are back (e.g. random freezes in ioQuake3
demo playback or WebGL conformance test run), but I can't track the
culprit down. This seems to be related to Gallium3D or relationships
between the r300g driver and the kernel, but due to initramfs-tools
0.98.8 preventing me from testing post-2.6.38 kernel ()

> 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.)

Yes, the missing cmd64x driver is back again in the 6.0.3 install media.

>> 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...

I wasn't really talking about a distribution upgrade. In fact, I
performed a "fresh" Wheezy install on a dedicated HDD from a running
Squeeze system using the debootstrap tool.

Since Wheezy debian-installer images are still broken, this is the
only way I've found.

I'm also waiting for a complete rebuild of eglibc including support
for accept4 system call
(http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=647825). This will
fix post-170 udev issue
(http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=648325) and allow
installation of GNOME Shell (I'm stuck with Classic GNOME at this
time).

     Émeric