[SPARCbook] More on Linux and the SparcBooks

[Thomas Roehr]

ell,  after reading the two responses about Linux and the 3GX,
I thought I would add my input.

I have been using Sparc Linux with the SparcBook for about 6 months, and

I am currently running a 2.4 kernel.

Here is a printout from Gnome System Information:

Distribution:                  Red Hat Linux
Operating System:              Linux
Distribution Version:          Red Hat Linux release 6.1 (Cartman)

Operating System Version:      #7 Mon Sep 18 20:51:05 EDT 2000
Operating System Release:      2.4.0-test8
Processor Type:                sparc
Host Name:                     skippy
User Name:                     troehr
X Display Name:                :0.0
System Status:                 4:06am  up 2 days,  1:04,  4 users,  load
average
: 1.31, 1.37, 0.97

While I was using the 2.3 kernels, the 3GX did run hot, but the 2.4
kernel seems to run cooler.

I have run this box for several days at a time with no problems. As for
functionality:

X Support. There seems to be concern over the fact that the 3GX
framebuffer support does not use any hardware to improve the
performance. I have looked through the NetBSD code, and they are doing
the same thing, treating the P9100 as a CG3. I feel that the performance
under Linux is noticably faster then with Solaris 2.6 and CDE. Gnome is
ok, FVWM2 is pretty good.  I do have a small patch that needs to be
applied to for the mouse driver to work on the 3GX.

Power Management. Derrick J. Brashear (shadow at dementia.org) has written
a driver to interface with the TS102 controller chip. I am going to work
on adding the hooks so that we can use the APM system to deal
with power management.

The rest of it will come in time, (along with hardware accelleration for

 X!).

I will provide Hugo shortly with the patches and instructions on getting

 a 2.4 Linux kernel running on a 3GX.

Tom Roehr
troehr at nj-onramp.com