x11-drivers/xf86-video-mga: current issues

[Tod McQuillin]

On Tue, 8 Jan 2008, Kevin Oberman wrote:

>> Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2007 11:04:56 -0700 (MST)
>> From: Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com>
>> Sender: owner-freebsd-x11 at freebsd.org
>>
>> On Thu, 13 Dec 2007, Randy Pratt wrote:
>>
>>> I've been using the xf86-video-mga-1.4.7,1 from that PR for awhile
>>> now and it performs like previous versions.  I can't use the version
>>> presently in the tree for reasons discussed on this mailing list:
>>>
>>>  http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20071103180058.1c1bd333.bsd-unix
>>>  http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20071103114415.7d910c32.bsd-unix
>>
>> Last I tried 1.4.7, dualhead did not work at all.  Single monitor setups
>> were okay.
>>
>> Has anyone who had problems with 1.9.100 contacted Tilman Sauerbeck or
>> put a bug report on bugs.freedesktop.org?  It would be nice to see this
>> problem fixed so we could all be running the same version.
>>
>> -Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA
>
> Amen!
>
> Now that I have rolled back(?) to 1.9.100 and my dual screen system is
> back to normal.

Just FYI, I was unsuccessful in getting 1.9.100 to work on my dual head 
DVI setup (G550).  I got the second monitor to come up, but it was offset 
with respect to the origin by several hundred pixels in both the X and Y 
direction (kind of hard to explain, but definitely unusable).  I tried to 
get it right with various invocations of xrandr but to no avail.  It's 
possible that further experimentation would have yielded a working setup, 
but before I could find out Xorg dumped core and I gave up working with 
1.9.100.

I had no luck with 1.4.7 either, but now I have a 100% working setup after 
applying Warren's patch 
(http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/mgapatch/xorg-patch.txt) and also (and 
this is the key part that made everything start working) copying *both* 
mga_drv.so and mga_hal_drv.so into /usr/local/lib/xorg/modules/drivers 
from the mga_hal port (x11-servers/mga_hal, files from 
matrox_driver-x86_32-4.4.0/xserver/7.0.0)

Using the mga_drv.so from the xf86-video-mga-1.4.7,1 I could not get any 
DVI output at all from Xorg but using the version from mga_hal it works 
fine.

Oh and finally, I have to use the -ignoreABI switch to Xorg, otherwise it 
won't start.

So, to summarise, to get dual head DVI working with a Matrox G550,

1) warren's patch for reading the video BIOS from /dev/mem
2) manually copy mga_drv.so and mga_hal_drv.so from
    matrox_driver-x86_32-4.4.0/xserver/7.0.0 in the x11-servers/mga_hal
    port into /usr/local/lib/xorg/modules/drivers
3) start X with -ignoreABI

Everything works beautifully after that as it did with xorg 7.2.

Hope this helps someone,
-- 
Tod McQuillin