I forgot about the NVIDIA drivers. Well, at least BeOS had support before the XFree guys did.
Congratulations, another selling point for BeOS! NOT! Adding support to the nv driver (which existed before the BeOS drivers) was as simple as adding the PCI id's of the Geforce2 (MX) cards.
Every OS falls back on software, but XAA (X Acceleration Architecture) is (by definition) not a software rendrer.
You're blowing smoke right?
0) WHAT IS XAA
XAA (the XFree86 Acceleration Architecture) is a device dependent
layer that encapsulates the unaccelerated framebuffer rendering layer,
intercepting rendering commands sent to it from higher levels of the
server. For rendering tasks where hardware acceleration is not
possible, XAA allows the requests to proceed to the software rendering
code. Otherwise, XAA breaks the sometimes complicated X primitives
into simpler primitives more suitable for hardware acceleration and
will use accelerated functions exported by the chipset driver to
render these.
XAA provides a simple, easy to use driver interface that allows
the driver to communicate its acceleration capabilities and restrictions
back to XAA. XAA will use the information provided by the driver
to determine whether or not acceleration will be possible for a particular X primitive.
There you have it, the definition of XAA. So, to answer your original question (again):
1) If it uses XAA, why does it only accelerate on MGA?
Because only the MGA driver has XAA render hooks in place right now. Apparantly Matrox hardware maps very easily to Render operations. Rumor has it NVidia will be releasing XRender enabled driver by mid January. No word on wether it'll be hardware accellerated initially.
OT: Meanwhile Be is ready for a buyout! With a market cap of just above $30M they are ripe for the picking. And to think JLG wanted $400M for a company that apparantly is only good at making PC demos:) Actually marketing and selling their stuff is foreign to the current management. Yep, as a former be fan myself it's really sad to see them struggle like this. But hey, nice demos and c00l technology simply aren't enough to survive. Patting yourself on the back for years on end isn't either:)
Updates to nv for GeForce2: Hah! BeOS had GeForce2 support before X!
Eh? GeForce2 support was supported before the NVidia drivers were released for BeOS, but who cares, X support is much better than BeOS (*cough* OpenGL 1.1.2 through GLX *cough*)
1) If it uses XAA, why does it only accelerate on MGA?
Perhaps because XAA falls back to software function if the hardware is not there (or not implemented yet), much like BeOS.
2) Does this mean that it becomes a Render vs 3D choice for NVIDIA users? As far as I can see, the NVIDIA drivers don't support the Render extensions. Or am I just confused.
XRender support will be (unofficially) leaked by mid Janaury. This is from a reliable source. So right now it's Render vs 3D yes. At least there's 3D, no such support on BeOS.
which is a Linux-centric product, unless I'm mistaken. I don't run Linux, I run FreeBSD
Oh, it should run fine on FreeBSD. That is if they fixed the silly pthreads bug that was preventing the player to run correctly. It has been ported to just about any UNIX variant out there including IRIX, Solaris, SCO, and NetBSD. If you can run esound you can use it. Yes, the name is a bit misleading, but it is not tied to ALSA:)
But the combined load of all those things at once not effecting the system, (and without custom plextor hardware burnproof tech)
Huh? What, so you're saying I should sacrifice hardware assisted burnproof in my drive, just to prove a point? Hahaha:) FYI, burnproof is not needed at all since playing Q3A (yes I actually tried it just now:) while burning a CD has resulted in the buffer being at least 79% full. That was with burnproof(tm) off, burning at 12X,and reading the ISO over Samba from my main server in the next room(100MBit).
How are linux companies doing again...?
Much better than Be for sure! Single Linux companies have received investments that come close to the market value of Be ($50 million). Oh, and most Linux only companies actually have a revenue stream! BTW, does IBM qualify as a Linux company? Seeing they are ready to invest about $1 billion dollars in their Linux operations next year? So please...comparing BeOS/BeIA business to Linux business is silly at best, idiotic at worst.
I have not seen the source for either, so i cant really compare the actual code, but the main point stands.
I'm the lucky owner of an *unsupported* BeBox (the 16th BeBox 133 in Europe if you'd like to know). So I do know BeOS, even programmed for it a while. My wish is still to get a pervasively multithreaded X toolkit some day. Yes, I even have 2 Be t-shirts that are worn out:) It was mucho fun, but I grew tired of all the incompatibilities, sucking network support (200K/sec when Linux is getting almost 1000K/sec), missing drivers, missing apps, lack of PPC support more recently, and all that. I came to the conclusion that the only thing BeOS was really useful for was managing and playing your MP3 collection. And even that stopped when I found out there was ZERO support for my new soundcard (Trident NX). But more importantly the spirit in the user community has gone from Fun and Supportive (1996-1998) to Mindless Drivel and Zealotery today, and that's probably the main reason I left Be/BeOS for what it was. Unless you jumped into BeOS before it went to x86 you will not known what I'm talking about.
Oh, BONE is coming you say? Not to my BeBox:(
OpenGL support for my GeForce2 GTS? Not according to NVidia. These are all things Be can be forgiven for, but it's reality today. And Linux, technically incompetent as it's perceived to be, provides me with all this and much more, today. Yes, yes I can almost hear someone screaming it's based on 1970's technology! Woehahaha, that would make BeOS... ancient:)
The only Be related thing I'm going to do is get me some BEOS stock at $1 next week and hope someone will buy out Be (next year) so I can
make a nice profit....
-adnans
PS. Yes I'm a bit biased since Linux puts some money in my bank account these days. What's your excuse? Oh right, running a BeOS news site:)
Exactly! Noone bloody cares about backward playing, except perhaps Be evangelists like yourself. Get over it dude!:)
And for your 36 songs... are they just playing backwards/forwards?
It really doesn't matter since the overhead of playing backwards is minimal, just check out the GPL source code of alsaplayer to see how it's done:)
Can you play 12 of em at 72% speed backwards?
Uhm, yeah, 12 songs backwards at 72% would actually consume less CPU cycles than 12 songs at normal speed, since you'll be decoding 28% slower:-) Yes, the point I'm trying to make is that this is a nice hack, nothing more, nothing less.
Can you run 3 different tracks of the same CD at once, some backwards some forwards?
If the seektime of my CD would allow it sure. Have not tried it because...well, it's kinda useless no?
And oh yeah, while you are doing that can you map 6 mov files to a software rendered realtime 3d cube?
I would if the software 3d cube existed. Noone has taken the time to write it for Linux. I'm sure it would exist if one of Linux's main jobs was running cool demo's at a computer booth on a trade show or something *grin*
If that isnt enough, you could always burn a cd while you were doing it...
Yeah, Burnproof(tm) technology rocks in the new Plex121032A. I betya I could play QuakeArena and burn a CD at the same time. Try that on BeOS!
But honestly, this was just to point out that mp3's backwards came from Be, and is not some great alsaplayer thing.
Great! Just wish they'd sell some more copies because of this. I think desperate times have arrived for Be.
Assuming you judge on technical competence and not a great socio-political belief structure about the nature of the software.
Go RMS! He's my hero... Oh, and you can't get more technical than viewing the source code:)
Install Soundplay on BeOS, and throw in a CD - you can play CDs backwards on the fly. Now *that's* cool.
Eeps, I think alsaplayer covers that one too! I just haven't had time to make a nice CD interface. And my Plexwriter 8x (SCSI) used to crap out at -300% (seeking was sloooow) so I didn't bother with it much:)
I wish Linux folks would venture out of *their*little OS domain
Really, I implemented this backward playing just to see if I could:).. There's no advantage to it, it's just funny. Oh, and alsaplayer was the first GPL player to play stuff backwards, so there!:)
Oh yeah, on most Be systems soundplay can play about 30 mp3's backwards, forwards, and at different speeds... simultaneously, and without skipping.
How about 36 simultaneous songs *without* skipping backward/forward on my Trident NX using alsaplayer and ALSA on Linux?
Of course this multiple simultaneous song playing is TOTALLY useless in real life, but hey, it's nice for articles right? I wish Be people (I was one once:) would venture a little outside their OS domain...BeOS is loosing its uniqueness every day (boy was it cool, back in 1996!)
Okay, so I need a "Multimedia OS" to play mp3's? Hehehe:) Get real dude. The power of Linux is that it's OPEN SOURCE and everybody loves it (momentum)!! I remember the days back when BeOS advocates were touting their Journalling FS everytime they got some attention, they still do. Today, Linux has a number of 64-bit Journalling filesystems of its own. Personally I'm using XFS from SGI. Crash recovery, i.e. hitting the RESET button for fun, is around 1 second on my 81 Gig partition. The moral of this story? Linux WILL rock in the embedded space!
If Linux wants to compete in this space
If BeOS wants to compete in this space it should try and build something else than glorified MP3 players:) I can't imagine BeOS/BeIA being useful in an army truck for example. But just yesterday the US army agreed to test a RealTime Linux based system in their vehicles. Now that's what I call embedded!
I've been doing some online shopping with Mozilla. Make sure you install the PSM (Personal Security Manager), found under the DEBUG Menu as "Install PSM". Works very well!
You should check out the XFree Render Extension that's being developed by Keith Packard (homepage here). This does antialiased text in X using your exisiting 3D accelerator (if possible). It also supports REAL alpha transparancy unlike the "let's make this Term psuedo transparent for this screenshot" crap you see all over the place.
-adnans
Size has nothing to do with being a microkernel. The architecture of the kernel makes it a micro or monolithic kernel; basically wether it does message passing or not.
Avoiding the obvious question of why can't the effort going into four diffrent projects be channeled into one
That's like asking all the *BSDs to work together with Linux. Diversity is a very good thing. Personally I think SGI's XFS is going to kick some serious butt since the SGI folks are all for high performance and huge I/O throughput performance. They've also shown they can do it (on Irix). Not that the other parties will stay behind. I just think SGI has a better chance at dominating the Journalling FS landscape in Linux...
If you're on a budget how about: Monitor + TV?!:)
I just got it working. TV resolution is only good at up to 640x480 for NTSC (can't get PAL to work for now). But it's neat to tune into your X server. The extra space on the TV is used for gkrellm and the other monitoring tools. That way I can keep an eye on my networks while channel surfing. You need the mga_drv released by Matrox which includes the HALlib.
BTW, Enlightenment 0.16.4 crashes on my Xinerama setup while WindowMaker works flawlessy.
Then see how many RPMs you get. On a good day I get about 4000 rpms on my G400 MAX with XFree86 drivers. Xi gives me a whopping 17000 rpms, that's 4 times faster!
Still, Xi is missing too many of the cool extensions: no Xinerama, no DGA, no VidmodeExt, so it's still not an option for me personally.
Re:XFS is a type 83 partition?!?!
on
XFS Beta
·
· Score: 1
If distro's screw up they're broken! Same goes for all the other utilities. True, up until a year or so a go ext2 was the only Linux native FS of importance. That has changed and I'm sure most distro's will do the right thing.
-adnans
Re:No, hacking is not a good thing
on
Hacking The Tivo
·
· Score: 1
This is the first time a browser loaded a page INSTANTLY! That's right, not even a flash. I just clicked on "More..." at this very article and within 1 second I had the page + 10 or so comments, as if the whole page was rendered as a whole. Is this a new feature?? I'm impressed!!
My provider has an extensive online helpdesk. Not that I need helpdesk handholding *g*. Check out http://www.xs4all.nl/helpdesk/index.php3, PHP driven, quite good. Hey, they even support Linux! There is also a "service center" where you can change your configuration or request other services without ever calling up the provider. Bottom line, you can automate or script many functions of the helpdesk.
Slashdot Mirror
Yea yea, shut up.
:) Actually marketing and selling their stuff is foreign to the current management. Yep, as a former be fan myself it's really sad to see them struggle like this. But hey, nice demos and c00l technology simply aren't enough to survive. Patting yourself on the back for years on end isn't either :)
Haha, calm down.
I forgot about the NVIDIA drivers. Well, at least BeOS had support before the XFree guys did.
Congratulations, another selling point for BeOS! NOT! Adding support to the nv driver (which existed before the BeOS drivers) was as simple as adding the PCI id's of the Geforce2 (MX) cards.
Every OS falls back on software, but XAA (X Acceleration Architecture) is (by definition) not a software rendrer.
You're blowing smoke right?
0) WHAT IS XAA
XAA (the XFree86 Acceleration Architecture) is a device dependent layer that encapsulates the unaccelerated framebuffer rendering layer, intercepting rendering commands sent to it from higher levels of the server. For rendering tasks where hardware acceleration is not possible, XAA allows the requests to proceed to the software rendering code. Otherwise, XAA breaks the sometimes complicated X primitives into simpler primitives more suitable for hardware acceleration and will use accelerated functions exported by the chipset driver to render these.
XAA provides a simple, easy to use driver interface that allows the driver to communicate its acceleration capabilities and restrictions back to XAA. XAA will use the information provided by the driver to determine whether or not acceleration will be possible for a particular X primitive.
There you have it, the definition of XAA. So, to answer your original question (again):
1) If it uses XAA, why does it only accelerate on MGA?
Because only the MGA driver has XAA render hooks in place right now. Apparantly Matrox hardware maps very easily to Render operations. Rumor has it NVidia will be releasing XRender enabled driver by mid January. No word on wether it'll be hardware accellerated initially.
OT: Meanwhile Be is ready for a buyout! With a market cap of just above $30M they are ripe for the picking. And to think JLG wanted $400M for a company that apparantly is only good at making PC demos
-adnans
So has anyone gotten the nvidia driver to work with kernel 2.4.0-test12??
/ctcp ice-dcc xdcc list
As someone posted her earlier, go to irc.openprojects.net (channel #nvidia), and then do the following:
Get the patches for test11 and test12 kernels. Apply to the kernel source module of NVidia and enjoy!
-adnans
Updates to nv for GeForce2: Hah! BeOS had GeForce2 support before X!
Eh? GeForce2 support was supported before the NVidia drivers were released for BeOS, but who cares, X support is much better than BeOS (*cough* OpenGL 1.1.2 through GLX *cough*)
1) If it uses XAA, why does it only accelerate on MGA?
Perhaps because XAA falls back to software function if the hardware is not there (or not implemented yet), much like BeOS. 2) Does this mean that it becomes a Render vs 3D choice for NVIDIA users? As far as I can see, the NVIDIA drivers don't support the Render extensions. Or am I just confused.
XRender support will be (unofficially) leaked by mid Janaury. This is from a reliable source. So right now it's Render vs 3D yes. At least there's 3D, no such support on BeOS.
What? You're not making sense...
which is a Linux-centric product, unless I'm mistaken. I don't run Linux, I run FreeBSD
:)
Oh, it should run fine on FreeBSD. That is if they fixed the silly pthreads bug that was preventing the player to run correctly. It has been ported to just about any UNIX variant out there including IRIX, Solaris, SCO, and NetBSD. If you can run esound you can use it. Yes, the name is a bit misleading, but it is not tied to ALSA
-adnans
But the combined load of all those things at once not effecting the system, (and without custom plextor hardware burnproof tech)
:) FYI, burnproof is not needed at all since playing Q3A (yes I actually tried it just now :) while burning a CD has resulted in the buffer being at least 79% full. That was with burnproof(tm) off, burning at 12X ,and reading the ISO over Samba from my main server in the next room(100MBit).
:) It was mucho fun, but I grew tired of all the incompatibilities, sucking network support (200K/sec when Linux is getting almost 1000K/sec), missing drivers, missing apps, lack of PPC support more recently, and all that. I came to the conclusion that the only thing BeOS was really useful for was managing and playing your MP3 collection. And even that stopped when I found out there was ZERO support for my new soundcard (Trident NX). But more importantly the spirit in the user community has gone from Fun and Supportive (1996-1998) to Mindless Drivel and Zealotery today, and that's probably the main reason I left Be/BeOS for what it was. Unless you jumped into BeOS before it went to x86 you will not known what I'm talking about.
:( :)
:)
Huh? What, so you're saying I should sacrifice hardware assisted burnproof in my drive, just to prove a point? Hahaha
How are linux companies doing again...?
Much better than Be for sure! Single Linux companies have received investments that come close to the market value of Be ($50 million). Oh, and most Linux only companies actually have a revenue stream! BTW, does IBM qualify as a Linux company? Seeing they are ready to invest about $1 billion dollars in their Linux operations next year? So please...comparing BeOS/BeIA business to Linux business is silly at best, idiotic at worst.
I have not seen the source for either, so i cant really compare the actual code, but the main point stands.
I'm the lucky owner of an *unsupported* BeBox (the 16th BeBox 133 in Europe if you'd like to know). So I do know BeOS, even programmed for it a while. My wish is still to get a pervasively multithreaded X toolkit some day. Yes, I even have 2 Be t-shirts that are worn out
Oh, BONE is coming you say? Not to my BeBox
OpenGL support for my GeForce2 GTS? Not according to NVidia. These are all things Be can be forgiven for, but it's reality today. And Linux, technically incompetent as it's perceived to be, provides me with all this and much more, today. Yes, yes I can almost hear someone screaming it's based on 1970's technology! Woehahaha, that would make BeOS... ancient
The only Be related thing I'm going to do is get me some BEOS stock at $1 next week and hope someone will buy out Be (next year) so I can make a nice profit....
-adnans
PS. Yes I'm a bit biased since Linux puts some money in my bank account these days. What's your excuse? Oh right, running a BeOS news site
Two points:
:)
:)
:-) Yes, the point I'm trying to make is that this is a nice hack, nothing more, nothing less.
:)
First off, the first GPL player thing... So what?
Exactly! Noone bloody cares about backward playing, except perhaps Be evangelists like yourself. Get over it dude!
And for your 36 songs... are they just playing backwards/forwards?
It really doesn't matter since the overhead of playing backwards is minimal, just check out the GPL source code of alsaplayer to see how it's done
Can you play 12 of em at 72% speed backwards?
Uhm, yeah, 12 songs backwards at 72% would actually consume less CPU cycles than 12 songs at normal speed, since you'll be decoding 28% slower
Can you run 3 different tracks of the same CD at once, some backwards some forwards?
If the seektime of my CD would allow it sure. Have not tried it because...well, it's kinda useless no?
And oh yeah, while you are doing that can you map 6 mov files to a software rendered realtime 3d cube?
I would if the software 3d cube existed. Noone has taken the time to write it for Linux. I'm sure it would exist if one of Linux's main jobs was running cool demo's at a computer booth on a trade show or something *grin*
If that isnt enough, you could always burn a cd while you were doing it...
Yeah, Burnproof(tm) technology rocks in the new Plex121032A. I betya I could play QuakeArena and burn a CD at the same time. Try that on BeOS!
But honestly, this was just to point out that mp3's backwards came from Be, and is not some great alsaplayer thing.
Great! Just wish they'd sell some more copies because of this. I think desperate times have arrived for Be.
Assuming you judge on technical competence and not a great socio-political belief structure about the nature of the software.
Go RMS! He's my hero... Oh, and you can't get more technical than viewing the source code
-adnans
Install Soundplay on BeOS, and throw in a CD - you can play CDs backwards on the fly. Now *that's* cool.
:)
Eeps, I think alsaplayer covers that one too! I just haven't had time to make a nice CD interface. And my Plexwriter 8x (SCSI) used to crap out at -300% (seeking was sloooow) so I didn't bother with it much
I wish Linux folks would venture out of *their*little OS domain
-adnans
So your big alsaplayer advantage is shot...
:) .. There's no advantage to it, it's just funny. Oh, and alsaplayer was the first GPL player to play stuff backwards, so there! :)
:) would venture a little outside their OS domain...BeOS is loosing its uniqueness every day (boy was it cool, back in 1996!)
Really, I implemented this backward playing just to see if I could
Oh yeah, on most Be systems soundplay can play about 30 mp3's backwards, forwards, and at different speeds... simultaneously, and without skipping.
How about 36 simultaneous songs *without* skipping backward/forward on my Trident NX using alsaplayer and ALSA on Linux? Of course this multiple simultaneous song playing is TOTALLY useless in real life, but hey, it's nice for articles right? I wish Be people (I was one once
-adnans
Okay, so I need a "Multimedia OS" to play mp3's? Hehehe :) Get real dude. The power of Linux is that it's OPEN SOURCE and everybody loves it (momentum)!! I remember the days back when BeOS advocates were touting their Journalling FS everytime they got some attention, they still do. Today, Linux has a number of 64-bit Journalling filesystems of its own. Personally I'm using XFS from SGI. Crash recovery, i.e. hitting the RESET button for fun, is around 1 second on my 81 Gig partition. The moral of this story? Linux WILL rock in the embedded space!
:) I can't imagine BeOS/BeIA being useful in an army truck for example. But just yesterday the US army agreed to test a RealTime Linux based system in their vehicles. Now that's what I call embedded!
If Linux wants to compete in this space
If BeOS wants to compete in this space it should try and build something else than glorified MP3 players
-copperwire
I've been doing some online shopping with Mozilla. Make sure you install the PSM (Personal Security Manager), found under the DEBUG Menu as "Install PSM". Works very well!
-adnans
Opera5 + Ads versus Mozilla + Modern Mozillium theme? No contest! Can't wait for the XRender conversion of Mozilla/Gtk+, sweet! Go Keithp!!!
-adnans
Yeah, FLTK is definitely cool. Imagine if the GIMP would have used FLTK in the beginning --> no horrible C based gtk+ API :)
You should check out the XFree Render Extension that's being developed by Keith Packard (homepage here). This does antialiased text in X using your exisiting 3D accelerator (if possible). It also supports REAL alpha transparancy unlike the "let's make this Term psuedo transparent for this screenshot" crap you see all over the place. -adnans
I always liked their shows.. Good going!! :)
Size has nothing to do with being a microkernel. The architecture of the kernel makes it a micro or monolithic kernel; basically wether it does message passing or not.
Well, I have a 700 and 900MHZ box. Would be a great deal if I could get board that could utilize both these babies, in about a year or so :)
Yes, I WILL buy a board that supports this, that is if I can run Linux on it!
-adnans
Try Debian/Sparc, if only to see apt in action.
Avoiding the obvious question of why can't the effort going into four diffrent projects be channeled into one
That's like asking all the *BSDs to work together with Linux. Diversity is a very good thing. Personally I think SGI's XFS is going to kick some serious butt since the SGI folks are all for high performance and huge I/O throughput performance. They've also shown they can do it (on Irix). Not that the other parties will stay behind. I just think SGI has a better chance at dominating the Journalling FS landscape in Linux...
-adnans
If you're on a budget how about: Monitor + TV?! :)
I just got it working. TV resolution is only good at up to 640x480 for NTSC (can't get PAL to work for now). But it's neat to tune into your X server. The extra space on the TV is used for gkrellm and the other monitoring tools. That way I can keep an eye on my networks while channel surfing. You need the mga_drv released by Matrox which includes the HALlib.
BTW, Enlightenment 0.16.4 crashes on my Xinerama setup while WindowMaker works flawlessy.
xengine :)
apt-get install xengine
Then see how many RPMs you get. On a good day I get about 4000 rpms on my G400 MAX with XFree86 drivers. Xi gives me a whopping 17000 rpms, that's 4 times faster!
Still, Xi is missing too many of the cool extensions: no Xinerama, no DGA, no VidmodeExt, so it's still not an option for me personally.
If distro's screw up they're broken! Same goes for all the other utilities. True, up until a year or so a go ext2 was the only Linux native FS of importance. That has changed and I'm sure most distro's will do the right thing.
-adnans
Sir, that note was for you!!
This is the first time a browser loaded a page INSTANTLY! That's right, not even a flash. I just clicked on "More..." at this very article and within 1 second I had the page + 10 or so comments, as if the whole page was rendered as a whole. Is this a new feature?? I'm impressed!!
-Fresh XFree 4.0 build (DRI)
-TWM (nostalgia)
-Athlon 700
-test1-ac18
-adnans
My provider has an extensive online helpdesk. Not that I need helpdesk handholding *g*. Check out http://www.xs4all.nl/helpdesk/index.php3, PHP driven, quite good. Hey, they even support Linux! There is also a "service center" where you can change your configuration or request other services without ever calling up the provider. Bottom line, you can automate or script many functions of the helpdesk.