ThinkPads - native savage_drv.o 1.1.27t now available

[Michael Collette]

On Monday 04 August 2003 09:19 am, Bruce M Simpson wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 02, 2003 at 04:22:26AM -0700, Michael Collette wrote:
> > Everything else, in the few short moments that I've been testing it,
> > appears to be okay.  The 3d aspects of this don't seem to be doing much. 
> > Tried viewing some OpenGL screensavers and they're as slow as ever. 
> > Still, and I really want to stress this point, what you did was a truly
> > wonderful thing!
>
> Glad someone's happy.

Big time!

> I should point out the version of the driver I've made available for
> download is not the recently released VIA/S3 driver. Their driver has a
> number of problems which need to be resolved before it will work on
> operating systems other than Linux.

The only oddity I've run into thus far is when I switch off of X into console 
mode with Ctrl-Alt-F2.  When I come back into X I sometimes get graphics just 
stuck in place.  One time it was an empty black square.  Another time it was 
the wait cursor icon.  Wouldn't have been that bad, except they showed up in 
the foreground.  Only a full restart of X got rid of them.

I still ain't goin' back to the old driver, no sir!

> Also, the 3D acceleration support is limited to the ProSavage and Twister
> series of chips in the Savage family, so the code is not useful to me
> right now.

It would be very cool to have the ability to at least try to get some of them 
cooler games working.  I've made it this long without as I keep a Win2k box 
around as a gaming machine... about all that thing does.

> If you like the Xv support in Tim Roberts' driver then you may wish to
> check out my port of s3switch, in /usr/ports/graphics/s3switch; this allows
> you to use the S-VHS and TV output present on some Savage-based cards,
> under FreeBSD.

I had a brief chance to play with this earlier in the day.  Pretty cool stuff!  
I need to get X all tweaked in to reset the video resolution for TV, as all I 
got was the upper left corner of the screen up on the TV.

One other little oddity with this.  As I stated, I can run mplayer through the 
xv output to get full screen video.  This works beautifully.  The funny part 
is that the video glitches if I try to make it smaller than the default size.  
It keeps playing, but it looks like something with horizontal sync gets 
wacked out.  This is true on both LCD and TV out.

> If S3 are willing to tidy up their code and backport it to the earlier
> Savage chips, then it will be useful on T22/T23, and I may be willing to
> spend more time on getting it to be a good (i.e. portable) XFree86 citizen.

With all these newer laptops moving to ATI and NVidia chipsets, it'll be 
interesting to see what all becomes of S3.  BTW, if ya need someone to run 
any additional testing for toys you're playing with over there, shoot me an 
offlist mail with a copy of what ya got going.  This is fun!

Later on,
-- 
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is."
- Yogi Berra