ASPEED video driver

[O'Connor, Daniel]

Hi,
Has anyone had success with the ASPEED Xorg driver? I have tried several versions (in ports, from ASPEED directly, from freedesktop.org etc) and they all hang trying to read DRAM information in ASTGetDRAMInfo. I am running FreeBSD 12 on a Supermicro X11SSH-F.


The hang is here:
     do {
        ;
     } while (*(volatile ULONG *) (pAST->MMIOVirtualAddr + 0x10000) != 0x01);

I patched it to use some hard coded values I extracted from an old system where it worked and it does run but the performance is quite terrible.

I've also tried scfb (performance is so so but it's stuck and 1024x768) and VESA (runs at 1920x1080 but the performance is intolerable).

I'm not expecting mind blowing performance but even the best performing option above is quite painful to use. These systems are mostly unattended but the bad performance does make the setup and test during installation quite painful.

Performance used to be tolerable but it seems to have gotten significantly worse in newer BIOS versions.

For now we are putting passively cooled GT710s in them but it would be nice to fix it properly.

I note that Linux has a DRM driver for these https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/ast 

However I'm not sure how that integrates with X.. If Linux doesn't actually use the Xorg driver then I suppose that would explain why it's rotted and useless.

If that is the case, does anyone know difficult it would be to port the Linux DRM driver?

I did try contacting ASPEED and Supermicro but they pointed the finger at each other and then blamed FreeBSD so I'm a bit stuck.

Thanks.

--
Daniel O'Connor
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
 -- Andrew Tanenbaum