From: Martin Rehwald <rehwald@uni-muenster.de>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 10:06:57 +0200

A bit confused...

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Well, after looking about some hout for an appropriate documentation solving my
problems i decided to send this mail.
If everything i ask for has been discussed in detail somewhere in the www space
of the ggi-project i apologize for inconvenience -- but i just didn't find it!

OK, some weeks ago i decided playing around a bit with OpenGL. One of the first
things i found out was that most contemporary graphics processors do include an
OpenGL engine. So one may want to render directly in the graphics card. Looking
for the appropriate library i decided that there is none really doing what i
want to do. So i decided to start some programming.
The GGI philosophy seems to be that acces to graphics hardware should be
controlled by some kernel level instance. This seems to be quite reasonable.
Soe the very first step i did was buing a graphics card supporting OpenGL
(actually i decided to get a Permedia2 based card as this seems to be the
cheapest solution at the moment) and began installing GGI (after having
installed the 3Dlabs X-server).
The X-server is running fine (except it seems to be much slower than the one
driving my good old S3 868 card...) and reports the following chip:
(--) GLINT: found GLINT Permedia 2v at card #11 func #0 with base 0xe1000000
(--) GLINT: Framebuffer address at 0xe0800000
(--) GLINT: videoram : 4096k
(--) GLINT: Using builtin RAMDAC of Permedia 2 chip
(--) GLINT: Fitted Memory type is : SGRAM
....
This agrees with what was written on the packing.  Fine.
So now i began building the kgicon module from the degas tree. One question i
could not answer configuring the driver was my cards clockchip.
By the way: it's a "Creative Graphics Blaster Exxtreme"
Ithink it is included in the Permedia2 itself, as the RAMDAC. If i am wrong -
let me know.
So i decided to use the fixed:none clock chip.
Probably not a so good idea, as the module built loaded but then told me that
there are no video modes available and hang the system.
As checking my disks takes much time i do not really
want to play around with all possible clock configurations. Looking around a
bit i found the kgi-0.9 package, an old 3Dlabs directory at Steffens account in
chemnitz holding some Permedia stuff and the kernels Permedia2 framebuffer
support.
Well, the kernel did not detect any Permedia2. (So the kernel driver's detect
function  differs from the one in the kgi module, as the latter did not
complain about not finding an appropriate device?).
Indeed the /proc/pci only finds
     VGA compatible controller: 3Dlabs Unknown device (rev 1).
      Vendor id=3d3d. Device id=9.    
Last not least i had a look at the kgi-0.9 tree which includes very littel
documentation about what, where, how and when. It's compilation failed in
fbcon.c due to:
fbcon.c:46: initializer element for `kgim_dpy.model[13]' is not computable at load time     
The tree even does not seem to include any Permedia2 stuff. Why?

So any advice where to begin with looking for mistakes i made/bugs in drivers
or whatever? Or how to do better/more successfull?

 Coming to the end can anybody comment on how to use a graphics chip's OpenGL
features? I think the kernel level does not want to know anything about OGL. So
should it be as follows: Some Mesa_4_Permedia2_on_kgicon, which is a libMesaGL
thet just passes the OGL commands via kgicon to the chip? If no, which design
would conform with the GGI-project's philosophy?

OK, seems this has become something like a short story and not a question to be
posted to a mailing list.
Nevertheless thanx to everyone reading this and thinking about my
thoughts/problems cause by them.

         Martin

--
Institut für Theoretische Physik I
Martin Rehwald                                                   Phone: (0251) 83-34921
Wilhelm-Klemm-Straße 9            E-Mail: mailto:Rehwald@UNI-Muenster.DE
48149 Münster                       WWW: http://pauli.UNI-Muenster.DE/~rehwald







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