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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."
I finaly replaced the carb on '84 accord, and now the engine doesn't stall. Too bad, it's all rusted and missing a wheel.
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!
I hope that, someday, you have a hobby that leads you to excitedly give away for free something that you had the time of your life creating and put all your pride into. Then, I hope that someone tells you what a waste of time it was and insists that you do something less enjoyable for yourself to satisfy his own selfish needs.
I brew my own beer, build my own guitar amplifiers, and write code for projects that have been ongoing for a decade with fewer than a dozen users. To many people, every one of these activities is an utter waste of time. Some of those people get in my face and tell me to spend my time doing something more useful. To that group, I say this: Screw you, I'm having fun.
That was beautiful. Thank you.
If the developer in question was doing this commercially, then points about priorities might stand. But it was done solely for fun, for love of an interesting project. To demand that people stop having fun is just... sad.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Virginity is underrated. What's really bad is getting laid once and never again! Or, at least, so I've been told. ;)