On Monday, April 26, 2021, BALATON Zoltan <bala...@eik.bme.hu> wrote:
> Hello, > > On Mon, 26 Apr 2021, Dr. David Alan Gilbert wrote: > >> Over the weekend I got a Red Hat 6.x (not RHEL!) for Alpha booting >> under QEMU which was pretty neat. But I failed to find a succesful >> combination to get X working; has anyone any suggestions? >> > > Adding Andrew who has experimented with old X framebuffer so he may > remember something more but that was on x86. Sorry, I still away from my desktop (with notes/logs), not sure when return.. I do not think I tried something that old.. Kernel 2.2 i guess, before any attempt at r128 drm Kernel module was written (in 2.4?) and so before ddx attempted to use that (as it tries by default in much newer distros) I tried Last debian for alpha, (5.0.x?) on qemu, it had bugs in cirrusfb in 2.6.26 Kernel so i compiled like 2.6.32.last inside emulated system.. This made fb works, But still there was no X for me... (can't recall exact error - May be even sigabort or sigbus - but do not count on my memory on this... /) Notes i used for launching qemu - https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2014/02/19/alpha-linux-on-qemu/ But Sadly pre-compressed disk image from that post really gone (it uses funny error Page telling you to use login/password, yet file can't be downloaded...) > That distro was from around 2000; the challenge is since we don't have >> VESA on non-x86, we can't change mode that way, so generic XF86_SVGA >> doesn't want to play with any of the devices. >> >> I also tried the ati device, but the accelerated mach64 driver >> didn't recognise that ID. >> > > The ati-vga partially emulates an ATI Rage128 Pro so it won't work with > mach64 driver that is older and while functionally similar has different > registers. You probably need to load aty128fb and then set a mode with > fbset then may need to edit X conf but I forgot which option was neded, > something about UseFb or similar so it won't try to change mode itself but > use the already set Linux FB because otherwise it did not detect the card > properly but I don'r remember the details so may be wrong. Also some 2D > accel is emulated so may work without disabling it but I think has some > bugs so it may have glitches. > > Has anyone found any combo that works? >> I suspect using one of the existing devices, lying about PCI ID, and >> then turning off all accelerations might have a chance but I've not got >> that far. >> > > Changing the PCI ID may not help as these ATI chips have different > registers so only compatible with the right drivers. I've tried to use > current ati-vga with a Mac ROM that expects mach64 but it did not work. > > It may help to add -trace enable="ati*" and maybe also enable some debug > defines in ati_int.h to see if it accesses the card at all but with the > right driver that works with Rage128Pro it should produce some picture at > least in fb console and we could run X with it on x86 before. > > More info on ati-vga is here: https://osdn.net/projects/qmig > a/wiki/SubprojectAti > > By the way, last time I've experimented with it I've found that mouse > pointer getting out of sync and jumping around is probably a result of > mouse acceleration on the host is not taken into account when tracking > guest pointer position. Is that possible and is there a way to fix it? > > Regards, > BALATON Zoltan >
