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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."
There is no one left at SGI who understands how to get X11 to talk to this old hardware. Those people were layed off back during the dot.com bust in early 2000's when SGI shifted focus from Irix to WinNT. Since then Irix has been on absolute minimum life support until it was EOL'ed in 2006.
Therefor it is nearly impossible to get any programming or hardware documentation even if the current SGI wanted to co-operate. It's all been shredded long ago and the people who wrote it are gone, gone, gone!
Virginity is underrated. What's really bad is getting laid once and never again! Or, at least, so I've been told. ;)