r300-based boards... Are they now officially a lost cause?

Sat Nov 3 21:35:38 UTC 2012

First of all, I apologize if I came of as slightly annoyed or cranky 
before.  I should probably learn to have breakfast before going through 
my inbox... :)

On 11/03/12 21:51, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
>
> In message<5094EE9F.70806 at freebsd.org>,
> Niclas Zeising<zeising at freebsd.org>  wrote:
>
>> To try to answer some of your questions...
>> The FreeBSD x11 team is currently only two members that work in it
>> regularly.  It is a big beast, and it grows more and more Linux-isms
>> every day, making porting increasingly harder every day.  The Linux
>> people have a tendency to break APIs and KPIs every now and again, just
>> to make porting hard.
>
> I sort-of knew (or rather had read) about the Linux-isms problem, but I
> did not realize that only two people work on x11-related stuff for FreeBSD.
>
> I can definitely understand how you guys would have your hands full!
> (You could in theory just "freeze" all x11-related stuff at some
> working state/level, but then, obviously, there would be a growing
> outcry, over time, about lack of support for the many _new_ graphics
> cards that seem to arrive on a regular basis.)

There are usually some more of us, but sometimes we need to do other 
things as well. :)
The most pressing issue is not manpower from people who knows the ports 
system however.  What is most needed is testers that can confirm that 
things work, or tell us when we break things.  It would also be nice to 
have FreeBSD people within the ranks of xorg developers, but that is a 
different problem.
>
>> The reason that mesa hasn't been updated to the
>> 8.0 branch in the ports tree is that this would kill support for
>> numerous legacy  graphics cards, and this would probably raise an outcry
>>from many, at least in the past that has been the case when something in
>> x11 land changes or breaks.
>
> Yes.  I read some online material about this last night.  There was some-
> thing someone had written about sheding support for many drivers for
> ancient cards.  I assume that happened, but I think that what I read
> said that r300 was just barely above the cutoff level.

In all honesty, I don't know exactly where the cutoff is, but I think 
the r300 should still be supported.
>
>> With that said, have you tried the newer xorg distribution, by setting
>> WITH_NEW_XORG=yes in /etc/make.conf and recompile all xorg related
>> ports?  Does it work?
>
> No.  I didn't know this was an option!  (Am I currently using "old"
> xorg??)

You are using the default xorg in FreeBSD.  It is an old version, but 
for the most part it works.  Most notably it lacks support for more 
modern intel based graphics cards.  It probably also lacks other 
features.  The WITH_NEW_XORG knob was added to make it possible for 
people to test more recent versions of the xorg distribution.  The 
ultimate goal is to use this version, but the risk is that support for 
much legacy hardware is removed.  We need a lot of help testing though, 
and probably a clearer picture on exactly what is supported and what is 
not supported.
>
> Question:  How can I know which things are and are not "xorg related ports"?
> Will the following command sequence give me a complete list?
>
>    pkg_info | fgrep xorg | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -n 1 pkg_info -r

That seem to give a fairly complete list.  If you have the time and 
computing power, the best option is probably to reinstall all ports from 
scratch.  It might also be possible to use a tool such as portmaster or 
portupgrade, but I have never tried this myself.
>
>> Even better, can you also try the experimental
>> ports repository, and see if that works?
>
> If I knew the first thing about it, then I might be able to give it a try.
> But this is the first time I have ever even heard of such a thing.
>
>> The latter will also give you mesa 8.0.
>
> I have no particular reason to believe that the SIGSEGV problem will be
> resolved by a newer Mesa release.  After all, I've seen the problem now
> on both 7.4.4 and also 7.6.1.  But it is worth a try, I suppose.

This particular problem I have no clue about.  It might (hopefully) be 
resolved in a more recent version of mesa, but it is very hard to tell 
exactly where the error occurs, and what the cause is.
>
>> More information can be found here: http://wiki.freebsd.org/Xorg
>
> OK.  I will have to ask you more about this off-list.
>
>> With regards to gallium, I suggest you use google to find more
>> information.
>
> I did (already).
>
> But some of the stuff I found seemed to make no sense... at least to me.
>
>> Perhaps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium3D will give
>> you some clues?
>
> I read that already, but was not able to understand much of it.  (As I said,
> I am not at all a graphics guy.)
>
> But I am re-reading it now...
>
> So, um, if I understand correctly "Mesa" currently contains:
>
>        1)  code to implement an API called "Mesa3d", and...
>
>        2)  code to implement a rather different API called "Gallium3D"
>
> Is that correct?  (Assuming so, it really _is_ a bit confusing to someone
> like me who is approaching all this stuff "cold", with no prior knowledge
> about any of this stuff.)
>
> So as far as applications go, they can elect to use one or the other API,
> right?  I guess that the information (specifically the stack traceback)
> that I included here:
>
>      http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=ports/166163
>
> does not really contain enough information to allow us to know which of these
> two possible APIs the gthumb application is actually using, right?

As far as I've understood, gallium3d is an API to make it easier to 
write graphics drivers for xorg.  This also means that some drivers have 
been rewritten with this api, while other drivers for the same cards 
still exist that uses a different API or tries to solve the problem 
themselves.  As far as I know, this API has always been unsupported on 
FreeBSD (this might be completely wrong though), so the chances are you 
are not using it.

I hope this clears some of the fog around this.  Some parts are quite 
confusing, and I don't know all the details myself either.  Please don't 
hesitate to ask if you have more questions!
Best Regards!
-- 
Niclas Zeising