1 Information for Rendition (Micron) Verite Users 2 The XFree86 Project Inc. 3 9 June 2000, last update by Dejan Ilic "dejan.ilic@home.se" 4 ____________________________________________________________ 5 6 Table of Contents 7 8 9 1. Supported hardware 10 2. Limitations 11 3. Important notices 12 4. Features 13 5. xorg.conf Option 14 6. News in the X11R7.5 release 15 7. News in the XFree86 4.1 release 16 8. Major changes in this release 17 9. Bugfixes 18 10. Known problems in current driver 19 11. Work in progress (not finished in time for release) 20 21 22 ______________________________________________________________________ 23 24 1. Supported hardware 25 26 All cards based on the V1000 or the V2x00 should be supported. The 27 server was tested on a miroCRYSTAL VRX (V1000), Intergraph Intense-100 28 3D (V1000), Diamond Stealth II S220 (V2100), Hercules Thriller3D 29 (V2200), Innovision Warrior3D (V2200) and Genoa V-Raptor (v2200). 30 31 32 2. Limitations 33 34 V1000 cards can only work as primary display card due to hardware 35 limitations. 36 37 V2x00 cards can work even if not primary, but primary display card 38 will be disabled when server is run. This is a driver limitation. 39 40 Hopefully these limitations were worked around and fixed before final 41 XFree86 4.0 release. 42 43 44 45 3. Important notices 46 47 Some V1000-based video cards are known to lock up the computer if you 48 have write-combine activated. Disabling it removes the problem. Look 49 for settings in the motherboards BIOS and disable ALL settings that 50 has to do with write-combine (usually called USWC or just WC for 51 short). 52 53 54 15 bits per pixel is only supported on V1000-based cards due to 55 hardware limitations on V2x00 chipsets. 56 57 58 If you have problems with hardware cursor use the "sw_cursor" option 59 to revert back to software cursor. 60 61 62 This is essentially a port of XFree86 3.3.x driver to the new XFree86 63 4.0 API, and thus we have put most of effort in making a working 64 driver with the most basic features. Support for multi-head support 65 and acceleration are next on the list of features to be included. 66 67 4. Features 68 69 70 o Hardware acceleration 71 72 o Hardware cursor 73 74 o Supported color depths 75 76 o 8 bits per pixel (256 pseudo colour) 77 78 o 15 bits per pixel (actually 16-bits with RGB-weight 555, 32768 79 colors) 80 81 o 16 bits per pixel (high colour, RGB-weight 565, 65536 colors) 82 83 o 32 bits per pixel (true colour, sparse 24bit, 16M colors) 84 85 86 5. xorg.conf Option 87 88 89 Option 90 Disables use of the hardware cursor. 91 92 Option 93 Run the memory at a higher clock. Useful on some cards with 94 display glitches at higher resolutions. But adds the risk to 95 damage the hardware. Use with caution. 96 97 DacSpeed 98 Set custom ramdac limit. We have currently no way of knowing if 99 the v2x00 chip is a v2100 (170MHz) or v2200 (203MHz and 230MHz) 100 so we assume the lowest. Use this option to manually override 101 the value. 102 103 Option 104 If writecombine is disabled in BIOS, and you add this option in 105 configuration file, then the driver will try to request 106 writecombined access to the framebuffer. This can drastically 107 increase the performance on unaccelerated server. Requires that 108 "MTRR"-support is compiled into the OS-kernel. 109 110 Option 111 Disable probing of DDC-information from your monitor. This 112 information is not used yet and is only there for informational 113 purposes. This might have changed before final XFree86 4.0 114 release. Safe to disable if you experience problems during 115 startup of X-server. 116 117 Option 118 If this option is enabled, the driver will cause the CPU to do 119 each drawing operation first into a shadow frame buffer in 120 system virtual memory and then copy the result into video 121 memory. If this option is not active, the CPU will draw 122 directly into video memory. Enabling this option is beneficial 123 for those systems where reading from video memory is, on 124 average, slower than the corresponding read/modify/write 125 operation in system virtual memory. This is normally the case 126 for PCI or AGP adapters, and, so, this option is enabled by 127 default unless acceleration is enabled. 128 129 Option 130 The option expect a value "CW" for clockwise or "CCW" for 131 counterclockwise rotation of the screen. This is useful when you 132 need more height then width on the screen. Desktop publishing is 133 one example where a monitor could display the whole page at once 134 on a monitor laying on the side. Notice that this option 135 requires "ShadowFB" and automatically enable it. It also 136 disables the acceleration. The option is not activated by 137 default. 138 139 140 6. News in the X11R7.5 release 141 142 This driver was originally part of the XFree86 4.4 rc2 release. 143 144 145 7. News in the XFree86 4.1 release 146 147 148 o DirectColor support 149 150 o SilkenMouse support 151 152 153 8. Major changes in this release 154 155 156 o Gamma works now for >8bpp 157 158 159 9. Bugfixes 160 161 162 o Only some code cleanup done. No real bugfixes. 163 164 165 10. Known problems in current driver 166 167 168 o The acceleration code hangs the computer during X-server startup. 169 170 o DDC-probing does not work correctly yet. No DDC information is 171 found. 172 173 o Switching from display to VC and back to display can lock up V2x00 174 cards. 175 176 o When scrolling the virtual display on a V1000 card parts of the 177 screen will become distorted. Problem disappears when you continue 178 moving around. V2x00 does not exhibit this problem. Probably a bug 179 in the driver rather than a limitation of the chip. 180 181 o Depth 15 & 16 has problems with colors when DirectColor is used. 182 183 184 11. Work in progress (not finished in time for release) 185 186 187 o Acceleration is disabled for the moment. If you want to play with 188 it enable the "USE_ACCEL" define in rendition.c file! Beware as it 189 has several bugs left to clear out before if is stable for general 190 use. 191 192 193 194