Octave Orgeron wrote:
> I'm still at a loss as to what the thinking is around Xorg support on SPARC.
> Supporting an 8-bit card in a world where many folks have upgraded, thanks to
> ebay, to something more modern with 24-bit graphics is a bit backward. I hope
> there are plans on supporting something better. Just seems that the focus on
> SPARC outside of the data center is lacking. Unfortunately, a good portion of
> the hardware sales for Sun are on SPARC.. not x64. You'd think that having a
> healthy SPARC workstation line-up would help increase those sales and justify
> the engineering. At this point, I wonder how much longer I'll be able to
> support my Sun Blade 2000 on SXCE with my Expert3d card. And since most of
> the work I do these days is on T-series servers.. and there isn't a niagara
> workstation.. looks like a bleek future with only noisy servers and no
> graphics.
The wsfb driver isn't a real support strategy - it was a cheap and
easy bootstrap method using the dumb frame buffer access available
on those old cards - it can't work on the more modern 3D cards
because they have various restrictions that make dumb frame buffer
access not possible. I use it and ship it, because it's the one
I have source for, and can post source for - I can't rebuild the
closed drivers to work with the new Xorg, so have to wait for the
SPARC graphics team to port and post them.
SXCE builds already include the kfb driver for the XVR-2500 cards,
which are the 3D accelerated PCI Express cards for the latest SPARC
workstations, the Ultra 25/45.
The OpenSolaris 2009.xx SPARC releases are planned to also include
support for the XVR-100 & XVR-300 cards that were the lower-end/2D
cards for those workstations.
Beyond those, we've discussed trying to get Martin's driver ports for
the older boards into the contrib repo for OpenSolaris or even into the
main repo as "not supported by Sun, but available for you to use", but
not come to a final decision yet.
--
-Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
