[rescue] DigitalServer 3305R/AS800 questions

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Tue, Apr 16, 2002 at 09:16:44AM -0400, Sridhar the POWERful wrote:

> You mean the RGB256?  It's a sweet chip.
> 
> If it's a white-box NT card, it probably one of the low-end RGB4XX
> chipsets.  The higher end chipsets are extremely expensive.  The ATI
> (formerly Diamond) FireGL cards all use IBM chipsets.  I think the
> top-of-the line FireGL4 uses an IBM RGB550 or RGB558 chipset, which would
> put it roughly inline with the POWER GXT550P.
> 
> The card for which I drool is the POWER GXT9500P.  2 IBM RGB512VV
> chipsets.  4.66 GFLOPS.  *drool*

So, if only we could convince IBM that the most important part of supporting
linux like they say they do is to release the docs for the RGB chips.

Assuming they are cleanly designed, it might mean getting a better graphics
architecture on OSs like Linux, NetBSD, etc.

I'm convinced that the proper way to run X is X on a framebuffer driver, the
the linux framebuffer console, and the Xfb driver.  But doing it that way
kills 3D acceleration at this time because of lack of a proper /dev/3d or
/dev/gl, or whatever.

Of course, one part of the question is how to prevent the windows crashing
video drivers in kernel space problem.  But then, this might not be such a
problem if more people could debug them.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd