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

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 01/25/14 07:52, Alexey Dokuchaev wrote:
> 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.

The drm(4) module on PPC sometimes has issues. You could try disabling 
it in your xorg.conf (or removing the relevant kernel modules, drm.ko 
and radeon.ko, from /boot/kernel) and see if that helps. It will make 3D 
slower, but might fix the stability issues.
-Nathan

> 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
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