Sharing experience: X11 on Mac Mini G4 (ATI RV280)

[Alexey Dokuchaev]

Hi,

After playing around with fresh -CURRENT on the console, I've built X11 bits
to see if I can go graphic.  Fresh ports tree, Nathan's patch [*] applied,
WITHOUT_NEW_XORG added to /etc/make.conf.

Results are not totally atrocious, but still somewhat disappointing.  Ports
that I've installed:

  x11-servers/xorg-server (w/out HAL/devd crap; AIGLX on; suid root)
  x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati
  x11-drivers/xf86-input-keyboard
  x11-drivers/xf86-input-mouse
  x11/{xterm,xinit,xauth}
  graphics/mesa-demos (for glxinfo/glxgears)
  x11-wm/openbox

A tiny ~/.xinitrc (should be enough for the test):

  xterm &
  exec openbox

1) Simply running "startx" (w/out /etc/X11/xorg.conf) both as normal user
   and root did not work: Xorg complained that "Primary device is not PCI"
   (WTF?) and "Failed to load module fbdev" (duh! didn't install that one;
   I want normal ATI driver and GLX/DRI support).

2) X -configure as root produced xorg.conf.new file with some meaningful
   Device section (mentions correct card name per pciconf(8); Driver =
   "radeon" and some probably correct BusID).  No idea why it could not be
   determined via simple "startx" without any X11 config though, like it
   had always worked for my on x86 for the past few years already.

3) Copying xorg.conf.new file to /etc/X11/xorg.conf allowed me to finally
   see xterm with openbox default window decorations; glxinfo reports that
   direct rendering is enabled.  glxgears reported around 85 FPS (that is,
   on Radeon 9200; on my ~2006 x86 laptop with Intel GMA 900 it is around
   830 FPS).  About five minutes later X hung.  Mac Mini itself was still
   alive (via ssh), but trying to switch consoles resulted in instant hang
   of the entire system, requiring me to power-cycle it.

4) It looks like OpenBox (I've tried both builds with and without Imlib2)
   has some endianess problem: xterm icon appeared greenish (in the window
   title and when switching windows with Alt-Tab).  Other colors (at least
   what I could see during this very short test run) were OK.  This seems
   particularly weird as I did not find any related patches in Gentoo/Arch
   packages of OpenBox.

I'd like to hear other's people experience with X11 on Mac Mini G4 against
recent -CURRENT.  Any ideas/pointers on how to remedy problems I've seen
are also much appreciated, thanks!

./danfe

[*] http://people.freebsd.org/~nwhitehorn/new_xorg_ppc.diff