YDL4.0: issues with FBDEV and XFree86

[Joseph E. Sacco, Ph.D.]

System:
        PowerMac [silver] with
        * dual 533MHz, G4 CPU's,
        * 1GB RAM,
        * (3) 73GB SCSI drives
        * NVIDIA GeForce2 MX (AGP 4X) video card with 32 MB of SDRAM
        * 22" LCD Apple Cinema Display

====================================================================
In an earlier post to the list, Beth Johnson reported that the fbdev
driver did not support a depth greater than 8 pixels. I have
experimented with using fbdev and confirm her observation.

I used fbdev when running YDL-3.0.1.  It worked just fine at depths of
8,15,16,24. Mac On Linux was happy. "molvconfig" reported lots of
available modes. MOL console video worked.  Life was good...

With YDL-4.0 *and* the "nv" driver, "molvconfig" reports very few
available modes. MOL console video does not work, because it cannot find
a compatible console mode.


What could be the source of the problem?
(1)  XF86Config entries
(2)  missing kernel modules
(3)  kernel level driver code
(4)  XFree86 4.4RC3

Discussion:
-----------
The entries in XF86Config are reasonably straight forward so I don't
think that's the problem.

I don't believe that I am missing any kernel modules.  I used the YDL
.config-smp as a starting point and added nVidia support as a module. I
didn't see anything missing during configuration, but that doesn't mean
that some module is not missing [:-)].

I have run tests using different kernels using source from
www.kernel.org:
* 2.4.28-stable 
* 2.6.9-stable
* 2.6.10-rc3

and see the same behavior.

So...,   That leads me to believe that there are some issues with this
version of XFree.

Thoughts???


-Joseph


-- 
Joseph E. Sacco, Ph.D. <joseph_sacco at comcast.net>