As promised, I am taking a break from developing OpenChrome for a while. I started to look at which other underserved graphics device I should improve the functionality. After looking at various candidates, I think for now, I should probably work on r128 graphics stack for ATI Technologies (they merged with AMD around mid to late Year 2000s) RAGE 128 family. I came to this conclusion based on the following reasons.
- ATI Technologies shipped quite a few RAGE 128 graphics cards during its hey day (from Year 1998 to 2000)
- I own about 8 different RAGE 128 based graphics cards (PCI and AGP)
- RAGE 128 was a relatively short lived family (Year 1998 to 2000), limiting the development scope
- Some technical documents can be found on the Internet
- Supports 32-bit color (many 20+ years old graphics devices support 24-bit color due to the very small frame buffer of that era) 2D and 3D acceleration
If I were to add one other major reason, it is that SiS and Matrox DDXs supports many generations of graphics devices within the DDX, and having to support more than one generation tends to complicate the device driver development. I also looked at S3 Savage and it appears to cover a fair number of devices than I originally imagined. Hence, I ended up with RAGE 128.
So, I started to look at the DDX code, and started the cleaning up process of the code. I have posted 10 patches over at xorg-driver-ati mailing list. The problem is, I do not have a commit privilege for the rest of xorg repositories (I only have commit privilege for OpenChrome related repositories.), so I cannot commit the code myself at this point.
Since I pay to host this blog, I have some freedom to say I think about what is going on, but I feel like some xorg developers drag their feet or play politics regarding the issue of who gets to commit the code into the repositories. I am not a newbie developer anymore, so I will feel like I should get repository commit privilege right away since I have been a responsible developer of OpenChrome graphics stack for the past 2 years. I have posted some of the patches 5 days ago, but I have yet to get the change committed into the repository as of this writing.
Brace Computer Laboratory 
PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE take a look into nouveau nv30/nv40. Those PCI-Express cards exist in millions on the planet. They are all broken with recent gnome/plasma. The nvidia binary blob have stopped supporting those and the bugs about those are reported since YEARS! Those cards exist in PCI, AGP and PCI-Express. For example the nvidia 6200 PCI dont work, the nvidia 6600 PCIExpress dont work, the nvidia 7900gtx make same problems, … . The whole system is crashing – and none of the developers care about that – for years! RedHead pays as far as i know 3fulltime developers and none of those care about that! Some of the nv30/40 chips are also inside of mainboards als intgrated GPU. The mainboard support 8-core cpu and 16gb of ram. Works really fast with SSD – and because the nouveau developers dont care about the issues, its intgrated GPU is useless with linux. The mainboard is beeing produced NEW recently and can be bought new on the market! This is insane. I have spend over 100hours in reporting this to every single developer of nouveau. Noone cares. PLEASE help. Please
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PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE take a look into nouveau nv30/nv40. Those PCI-Express cards exist in millions on the planet. They are all broken with recent gnome/plasma. The nvidia binary blob have stopped supporting those and the bugs about those are reported since YEARS! Those cards exist in PCI, AGP and PCI-Express. For example the nvidia 6200 PCI dont work, the nvidia 6600 PCIExpress dont work, the nvidia 7900gtx make same problems, … . The whole system is crashing – and none of the developers care about that – for years! RedHead pays as far as i know 3fulltime developers and none of those care about that! Some of the nv30/40 chips are also inside of mainboards als intgrated GPU. The mainboard support 8-core cpu and 16gb of ram. Works really fast with SSD – and because the nouveau developers dont care about the issues, its intgrated GPU is useless with linux. The mainboard is beeing produced NEW recently and can be bought new on the market! This is insane. I have spend over 100hours in reporting this to every single developer of nouveau. Noone cares. PLEASE help. Please
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Finally someone willing to fix the rage 128 and Radeon drivers that have been broken for 10 something years!
I’ve tried everything to get them working including custom compiling the kernel, xorg, and xorg drivers. Each custom compiled part getting past some errors that prevented acceleration only to have a new error occur preventing activation of 2d and 3d acceleration. Currently I have managed to get to a point where these /dev entries automatically register /dev/fb0 /dev/dri/card0 & /dev/agpgart and xorg starts to activate 2d and 3d acceleration but complains about lack of dri2 support (even though the custom compilations I did, explicitly included dri2)
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