[ltp] Confusion about Xorg drivers

[Alex Deucher]

On Mon, 13 Dec 2004 11:21:56 -0800, John Locke <mail@freelock.com> wrote:
> Thanks for your replies...
> 
> On Sat, 2004-12-11 at 19:26 -0500, Alex Deucher wrote:
> 
> > The most full-featured driver available for radeon is the xorg radeon
> > driver in cvs.  the xorg 6.8.x radeon driver is pretty good as well,
> > but is missing some of the latest tweaks.  TV out is not currently
> > supported on radeon (although there are some hacks available). pretty
> > much everything else you are looking to accomplish can be handled by
> > the current xorg radeon driver.
> > 
> Okay, so this is the one called "radeon"? Mandrake seems to install
> "fglrx" by default--I'm assuming this is the ATI-written driver? What is
> "fbdev"?
> 

fglrx is ati's binary only driver (supports r2xx-r4xx; 2d, 3d)

ati/radeon is the xorg/xfree86 open driver (supports all radeons for
2d, r1xx-r2xx for 3d)

fbdev is the linux kernel framebuffer.  X can run on top of a kernel
framebuffer device.  some drivers (like radeon) can also run in
conjunction with fbdev (fbdev does the mode setting, radeon driver
handles accel, etc.).  Unless you are running a mac, there's not
really much use for this option in conjunction with X.

> Can someone point me to a writeup of a TV hack that might work? I did
> get atitvout to detect the TV when I booted with the tv connected, but
> otherwise it doesn't seem to detect it at all, and it couldn't find the
> proper device in xorg.conf to actually use it (or at least that's my
> assumption)...
> 

there is a utility called atitvout which uses vbe calls to enable
tv-out, but I've never tried it.  FWIW, the beos radeon driver has
support for tv-out and the code could be ported over to xorg, someone
just has to do it.

Alex

> Thanks,
> 
> --
> John Locke
> "Open Source Solutions for Small Business Problems"
> published by Charles River Media, June 2004
> http://www.freelock.com