Another VIA UniChrome/Chrome9 Driver

[Intron is my alias on the Internet]

Robert Noland wrote:

> Ok, I spoke to a couple of the unichrome developers and my patch isn't
> quite right, but it is close enough for you to test.  It seems that the
> openchrome driver needs to match not only the chip id, but the card id
> also.  It apparently needs this to know what ports to enable (panel,
> crt).  Both your chip id and board were there, but not in the right
> combination.  I have a proper patch for your board now, which has also
> been committed to openchromes svn repo...
> 
> robert.
>  

Thank you for your patience.

With your patch http://www.openchrome.org/trac/changeset/686/trunk/src,
Xorg can work on my laptop one-off. That is, for the first time I start
Xorg, it works well. For the second time, my laptop go to die. Maybe
it is because I'm using 8.0-CURRENT in order to debug my USB drivers.
And even for the first time, HWCursor doesn't work, which makes me
have to enable SWCursor.

Just before I read some codes in openchrome, xf86-video-via and the one
on http://linux.via.com.tw/. I guess in the past years, VIA and OpenChrome
probably borrowed codes from each other.

Now, I propose that the driver from linux.via.com.tw needs to be pushed
into the port tree of FreeBSD. After all, it is an alternative choice for
users.

I adore you and other developpers of OpenChrome very much. But after all
you are doing hacking and/or reverse engineering. And the information
about VIA chips that you have got is seriously inequal to what VIA
know about itself.

By the way, I have tested MPEG-2 decoding of VIA chips on all products
in my hands (PM890, CN700 and CN896). The result disappointed me very
much. I put much hope on CN896, the best one of them. I found
Fedora Core 5 after long searching on the Internet here and there,
and then configured Xorg with the driver from VIA (the last one on the
page):

http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx?PageID=420&OSID=30&CatID=2770&SubCatID=189

This driver is the only one that fully supports MPEG-2 decoder as far
as I found. After compiling VeMP (http://sourceforge.net/projects/vemp/),
I wished CN896 could play HDTV (1920x1080) MPEG-2 materials smoothly.
But actually, in my testing, CN896 could only play materials at 1440x810
(from http://anon.nasa-global.edgesuite.net/anon.nasa-global/NASAHD/Lunar_Surface/LunarSurface_HD_1080i.wmv ,
reencoded to MPEG-2 with MEncoder at nearly the same bit rate) with a
little lag. And just as described in VeMP's documentation, occasionally
the machine died while playing.

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                                                From Beijing, China