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Hardware-Accelerated Graphics On SGI O2 Under NetBSD

Zadok_Allan writes "It's a bit late, but since many readers will remember the SGI O2 fondly, this might interest a few. The gist of the story is this: NetBSD now supports hardware accelerated graphics on the O2 both in X and in the kernel. We didn't get any help from SGI, and the documentation available doesn't go beyond a general description and a little theory of operation, which is why it took so long to figure it out. The X driver still has a few rough edges (all the acceleration frameworks pretty much expect a mappable linear framebuffer, if you don't have one — like on most SGI hardware — you'll have to jump through a lot of hoops and make sure there's no falling back to cfb and friends) but it supports XRENDER well enough to run KDE 3.5. Yes, it's usable on a 200MHz R5k O2. Not quite as snappy as any modern hardware but nowhere near as sluggish as you'd expect, and since Xsgi doesn't support any kind of XRENDER support, let alone hardware acceleration, pretty much anything using anti-aliased fonts gets a huge performance boost out of this compared to IRIX."

2 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What a waste of time by Zadok_Allan · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    People like you kept me from getting involved with Linux.
    A few points for you to consider:
    - you want to tell me what to do for fun in my Copious Spare Time? Get lost.
    - please learn to read - what makes you think this has anything to do with Linux at all?
    - Linux needs help? Well, go help them instead of wasting time here.

  2. Re:Hmmm... by Jurily · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    This is different than my Dell laptop with Intel graphics running Linux how, exactly?

    It's not. Learn to read. That was exactly my point.