getty or X problem on Ultra 10

[Marius Strobl]

On Sat, Nov 08, 2008 at 10:02:39AM +0300, Yousef Raffah wrote:
> Hello Everyone,
> 
> This is the first time for me to play with FreeBSD on a SPARC64  
> machine. I have Ultra 10 box sitting next to me doing nothing so I  
> figured why not make use of that machine. The installation of 7- 
> RELEASE went fine and everything seems to be normal on the Sun monitor  
> connected to it through that "strange" cable. However, I want to hook  
> it up to a bigger screen through the VGA card available on the same  
> box and here starts my problem. When I connect the cable to any  
> monitor from that VGA card (ATI Rage 3D) it shows nothing (white  
> screen). I thought maybe I need to change some parameters with  
> vidcontrol but I couldn't figure out how. Later on I decided to  
> install X and give it a shot but that still didn't help. I tried  
> different X configurations (Dual monitors as well as a simple single  
> vga screen) but without any luck.
> 
> However, there is one thing I noticed, whenever the machine boots, I  
> get some getty messages on the console complaining as:
> open /dev/screen: No such file or directory
> open /dev/ttya: No such file or directory
> open /dev/ttyu2: No such file or directory

This is nothing to worry about, /dev/screen and /dev/ttya
are disabled in /etc/ttys by default though.

> 
> When I start X it spits out: xf86MapVidMem: could not mmap screen  
> [s=2000, a=e2000000] (Invalid argument). Unfortunately googling that  
> statement does bring out much of helpful threads, therefore, I thought  
> of joining the team here to check if there is anything I can try or if  
> any of you had such a problem and how it was solved, if it ever was :)
> 

For machfb0 (the on-board ATI Rage 3D) to be usable by
X it must be the primary framebuffer, with an AFB or FFB
card (the card with the "strange" 13W3 connector) present
in a U5/U10 the firmware automatically assigns the "screen"
alias to the AFB/FFB though, thus making the AFB/FFB the
primary one. Similarly, syscons(4) also will only use the
primary one for output. So in order to make the on-board
ATI Rage 3D work you need to either pull the AFB/FFB card
or set the Open Firmware environment variable "output-device"
to the full path of the ATI Rage 3D instead of the "screen"
alias. If you want to run X with that setup, make sure
there's no "BusID" option in the section for the "ati"
driver left from when using "sunffb". I'm not sure whether
it's currently possible to run a dual-monitor setup with
this and X.org as I had no machine where the firmware would
allow a combination of AFB/FFB card and a MACHFB back when
I tried to test that. In theory it should work though but
would also require the MACHFB to be the primary framebuffer
and the "BusID" set to "SBUS:fb0" for the "sunffb" driver.

Marius