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

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

In message <50958B70.1010605 at freebsd.org>, you wrote:

>First of all, I apologize if I came of as slightly annoyed or cranky 
>before.

No no!  Not at all.  Did I?

If anyone did, it was probably me, and I apologize.

>I should probably learn to have breakfast before going through my inbox... :)

Join the club! :-)

>> 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. :)

What?  Do you really mean to tell me that you take time out from your
important x11 work to eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, and occasionally
do things to actually make a living?

How dare you!

>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.

I'm trying to do my part.

>>> 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, 

Well, you can always do what Bill Gates does... just ship it and then
wait for the user complaints to come rolling in, and then clean up the
mess afterwards.
:-)

>> 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.

OK.  I think the set of ports works out to almost the same thing either way
(i.e. just about everything).

>It might also be possible to use a tool such as portmaster or 
>portupgrade, but I have never tried this myself.

That was my plan.  I use portupgrade.

>> 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"
>>...
>...  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.

By "this API" I assume that you mean "Gallium", correct?

>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!

Thank you.  That is most generous of you.

Before I take up more of your time, I should really go and do the rebuild
the ports with WITH_NEW_XORG and then see what happens with my bug.

I need to find a clean disk first, or one that I can wipe.

(I have a kind of nice setup here with removable drive trays, so I can
swap disks on my #2 machine almost as easily as swaping in a fresh roll
of toilet paper.)