[ltp] graphics board for docking station - recommendations?

[André Wyrwa]

Hi,

> It was my impression that the RandR extension (introduced with XFree86
> 4.3.0) has the ability to do this. However, it has to be supported by
> the driver. On my Radeon M6, it is not. The output of xrandr shows:
> 
> Rotations possible - normal 
> 
> So, no rotation possible. If you run it on hardware where the driver
> supports rotation, the xrandr output would look like this:
> 
> Rotations possible - normal left inverted right

Thx for the hint. I did some more intense googling in regard to this
which gave the following results and raised some more questions:

It seems that DRI is not supported on Matrox PCI cards as opposed to
Matrox AGP cards and Radeon (AGP & PCI) as well as Nvidia (binary
drivers, AGP & PCI).

Driver side rotation seems to be supported on Matrox PCI and Nvidia PCI
but seems to be missing in the Radeon driver.

As for xrandr:

As far as I understand now xrandr is supposed to be driver independent.
It seems that with X 4.3.0 it should output 'Rotations possible -
normal' regardless which card one is using, 'cause the problem is that
the XServer doesn't implement support for the rotation feature in
Version 4.3.0.

I get the same output on my savage driver even though the savage driver
has a driver native rotate Option (which I didn't bring to work so far).
So questions are:

Does anyone have experience with xrandr rotation? Does anyone get
something like 'Rotations possible - normal left inverted right'?

Did anyone try the development version of X (4.3.99...)? Did the xrandr
rotation support make any progress? I read that somebody was working on
that already before the 4.3.0 release but that i was not supposed to be
expected ready for 4.3.0 .

The Radeon driver seems to have good PCI support through the option to
force use of pcigart. Experiences?

When using a binary NVidia driver and the X savage driver together, can
I just disable DRI for both drivers or will this disable software 3D for
the savage? Because else it seems like I'd have to use two different
XF86Configs which as far as my understanding goes would lead to
unability to use Xinerama.

Also I'm wondering about the Kernel framebuffer support. Anybody using
the radeon framebuffer driver which is claimed experimental in 2.4.22?

Is anyone using rotation at all? Is the speed loss caused by disabled
hardware accelleration recognisable?

Thx for any replies,
Andre.