[SunRescue] For trade/sale: sbus svga card

[James Lockwood]

On Fri, 12 May 2000, Ken Hansen wrote:

>     What OS are you using? Solaris can take advantage of built-in
>     hardware acceleration, Linux can not - the same may be true
>     for other *free* OSs.

This is not quite true.  Graphics acceleration is a function of the X
server, and the OG X11 cg6 drivers perform quite well.

> What would it take to have SPARC Linux use hardware acceleration,
> like a TurboGX+ card? I would love to see that happen - is it just
> impossible (i.e. Sun won't release needed info), or not worth it (as in
> it would be a great effort to code for such a "classic" framebuffer)?

The cg6 had a very open spec and drivers for it have been in the
mainstream X server for quite a long time.  The extra acceleration
features provided by the TGX+ are largely transparent and should kick in
automatically.  Many, many people were using MIT X11 under SunOS 4 with
cg6 cards.

It's cards with relatively small production runs (cg12, leo, etc) that are
the real problem driver-wise.

-James