Re: What is the best supported framebuffer for sparc64?

Matthieu Herrb wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 03, 2010 at 10:15:46AM -0400, William Schaub wrote:
>> I have recently installed OpenBSD 4.7 on my SunBlade 2000 with an
>> XVR-500 framebuffer.
>> The documentation lead me to believe that the XVR-500 as decently
>> supported but that
>> appears to not be the case. It only does about 7bpp and does not
>> have much in the way of
>> acceleration. After looking at the driver I found out that nobody
>> will release the hardware
>> info for this card  so i gave up on it.
>>
>>
>> I ended up ripping an Elite3D card out of an old Ultra 10 and  that
>> at least gives me 24bpp
>> but there are still lots of problems with it (all OpenGL looks like
>> a photo negative,
>> rdesktop displays in reversed color as well)
>>
>> I'm guessing one of the ATI chipset based cards would be better
>> supported over all
>> so what I want to know is which card is the best performing and best
>> supported currently
>> on the sparc64 port of OpenBSD so that i can just buy that card and
>> have X working 100%.
>>
>> I mainly use this machine as my primary deskop and want to view
>> movies in mplayer ocasionally
>> but would like to be able to do decent 3D acceleration as well.
>  
> Honestly, given your specifications, none of the sparc64 framebuffers
> is going to give you satisfaction. 
> 
> There is no accelerated 3D support, and no reasonable Xvideo support
> on any of them for now, mostly because lack of developper support
> (most of the upstreams X.Org developpers don't care about non Linux,
> non x86 hardware).
> 
Actually on my Ultra 10 with mach64 onboard video the Xvideo extension 
loads and does actually work. and I know there is at least one 
framebuffer (I think its the XVR-100 that is based on a radeon chipset. 
) and I think those drivers borrow from the PC drivers for the same but 
I can't verify for anything other than the mach64 driver on my Ultra 10.

Oddly enough the Xorg mach64 driver drives the display better than 
Solaris ever did. (but I don't think sun ever bothered to do much with 
that low end graphics option in their drivers)

> For your goals any cheap 2nd hand reasonably recent (less than 4 years
> old) i386 or amd64 based machine is going to give you a better desktop
> experience. pick up a r300 based radeon graphics card for both 3D and
> XVideo support. 
> 
> Or prepare to invest some time and energy working with oga@ and
> kettenis@ to improve the support for sparc64 framebuffers in
> OpenBSD.

I don't mind helping to make the sparc64 port better but writing drivers 
is a bit beyond me. I would be glad to help out in any way I can though.