XFree86 multihead with debian woody ?

[Harald Welte <laforge@gnumonks.org>]

Hi!

I'm trying to get a working XFree86 multihead setup with Debian woody.

The system is a G4 MP with two 450MHz 7400 CPU's 

The main graphics board is an ATI Rags 128 AGP, which is running perfectly
with aty128 framebuffer and XFree86.

I've tried to use the following PCI VGA boards for the second head, without
success:

1) 3dfx Voodo Banshee

I have a couple of those boards left, sice they have good X11 2D performance
and make excellent 2nd heads on x86.  However, on PPC there are problems:
	
    a) the tdfxfb driver included in the stock kernels (up to 2.4.18)
       is not able to do multihead.  Even if I try to use tdfxfb driver
       as the single head, the framebuffer is not working.  The machine 
       completely hangs at module load time.
    b) the alternative 3dfx driver available from 
	http://www.medex.hu/~danthe/tdfx/
       This driver actually does load, but the second monitor remains in
       DPMS power-off.  The driver works quite fine on the same 3dfx board
       on x86.  I've tried to read out the VGA register settings on the
       x86 box, and setting the registers accordingly on the PPC.  This
       actually gives some screen output (sync seems ok) but only weird
       crap.

The XFree86 driver for the 3dfx boards doesn't work as well.  XFree 
logs that it detects the board, loads the driver, ... - but nothing is 
actually written to the screen. 

2) ATI Rage 64

The monitor was always showing red vertical bars, in framebuffer,
using XFree fbdev driver as well as xfree86 ati driver :(

3) Matrox Millenium G200

Framebuffer works great, I can use the framebuffer console.  Using the 
XFree86 unaccellerated fbdev driver, it also works.  But slow as hell, since
there is no acceleration.

The XFree86 mga driver either causes kernel oops or causes weird output
on the mga board :(


So now after spending multiple days in trying to get a working multihead
setup, can anybody recommend a PCI graphics board which does work with
the debian woody supplied XFree86 package?

Thanks.


-- 
Live long and prosper
- Harald Welte / laforge@gnumonks.org               http://www.gnumonks.org/
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