general video question

[R Shapiro]

Michael Tucker writes:
 > A x86 Linuxer told me that getting "accelerated drivers" for a
 > video card meant replacing the XFree86 program with an accelerated
 > version written by the video card's company. 

The accelerated drivers are small loadable modules that live in
/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers.  The server itself doesn't change. 


 > Does the PPC port simply provide an executable that has support for
 > all the differnet cards?

No, it uses modules just as every other linux version does.  Plenty of
accelerated driver modules are provided with the powerpc XFree.




 > this on the list? Or, are we not getting the full power of the
 > acceleration from whatever ATI or Nvidia card is in our boxes?

Some of the accelerated drivers are little flakey.  For example the
nvidia accelerator (nv) can only be loaded once per boot.  But if they
load at all, they work well.  The nv accelerator is great, as long as
you never quit X...

You have to adjust your XF86Config-4 file if you want to use an
accelerated driver, by modifying the 'Driver' entry in the 'Device'
section(s).  There's one 'Device' section per installed card.



Btw the Darwin/OSX port of XFree is significantly different from any
linux version.  In that special case, the server is effectively
hardwired to use the Quartz [?] windowing system.  So no config file,
no accelerated driver modules, etc.

-- 
rshapiro@bbn.com