Hardware-Accelerated Graphics On SGI O2 Under NetBSD

Zadok_Allan writes "It's a bit late, but since many readers will remember the SGI O2 fondly, this might interest a few. The gist of the story is this: NetBSD now supports hardware accelerated graphics on the O2 both in X and in the kernel. We didn't get any help from SGI, and the documentation available doesn't go beyond a general description and a little theory of operation, which is why it took so long to figure it out. The X driver still has a few rough edges (all the acceleration frameworks pretty much expect a mappable linear framebuffer, if you don't have one — like on most SGI hardware — you'll have to jump through a lot of hoops and make sure there's no falling back to cfb and friends) but it supports XRENDER well enough to run KDE 3.5. Yes, it's usable on a 200MHz R5k O2. Not quite as snappy as any modern hardware but nowhere near as sluggish as you'd expect, and since Xsgi doesn't support any kind of XRENDER support, let alone hardware acceleration, pretty much anything using anti-aliased fonts gets a huge performance boost out of this compared to IRIX."

IRIS != IRIX

[Hazelesque]

IRIS is not the same thing as IRIX.

IRIS[1] stands for "Integrated Raster Imaging System", and was the name of a series of SGI hardware.

1. See http://www.irisindigo.com/index.php/Main_Page [irisindigo.com]

NetBSD is cool. Quit whining.

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to chime in here to answer back to all the "Why? WHY?!!" posts...

I used NetBSD on an old PC I got for free. I like Linux and have had good experiences, but there was something in this PCs hardware the linux kernel didn't like, and NetBSD installed just fine. The man pages for NetBSD were very good, as was the FAQ, and I was able to get everything working just by reading the directions that came with it. I didn't have to scour the web for some obscure web page for the memoirs of some hacker overseas recalling the steps he took to get X11 working.

NetBSD is a fine OS. It very minimal. So, yes, it's missing a lot. But I found it pretty workable without that "you're lost in a maze of configuration files all alike" feeling.

On the environmental side, we should support ALL efforts to get old hardware working. OSS/GNU/BSD should actively support older hardware out-of-the-box. Broke students, the poor in 3rd world countries, kids who get hand-me-down computers that are older than they are... if free software would agressively support old hardware, these machines could be used. I mean, many MacOS ports of free software only run on 10.4 and 10.5, some won't even compile on 10.2 or 10.3 without major source changes...

But it's easier to compile OpenOffice so that you need 512 MB of RAM to get it load in a reasonable time. Firefox is one of the few that works well on old hardware, but it's an exception.

Also, working NetBSD accelerated video may mean a Linux equivalent is in the works. And that other SGI cards will become easier to finish drivers for (people will read the O2 source and realize oh, maybe the Onyx is programmed in a similar way...).

More working open source Operating Systems are better for everybody all around. Every time you use MacOS X, realize that a lot of what you're using was ported from FreeBSD and NetBSD. Yes, OS X is based on NextStep, but 4.2 lack drivers for modern hardware and modern GNU/BSD-style tools. Apple got what it needed from the BSDs and ran with it. And the finished product is worth it.

Re:What a waste of time

[howlingmadhowie]

well, it's about using a computer some of us grew up dreaming about in freedom with a modern software stack. i think the correct tag for this story would be 'insanely cool'.

Re:Octane / Onyx

[Zadok_Allan]

I seem to remember IRIX having an xrender library available, possibly from sgifreeware or nekochan, or does it just do software rendering? IRIX used to make a very fast X terminal, but modern apps always seemed very sluggish on it and perhaps that's why..

That's the client library, as far as I know there is no Xrender extension for Xsgi so all anti-aliased text is rendered client-side, by software, which burns lots of CPU cycles. On slow CPUs like the R5k that really, really hurts.

About Onyx and Octane - there's linux code available to make IMPACT-based boards do tricks but nothing for vPro, let alone Reality Engine or Infinite Reality. IIRC all these graphics options understand OpenGL opcodes more or less directly so once someone finds out how to feed them commands the rest should be easy.
( btw. the O2's rendering engine is nothing like that, you program it like most other graphics chips, by hammering data into registers or feeding register write commands into a ring buffer )