Hi guys,

We're about to open up the XGI Projects Program again. We approved a handful of the relevant ones that were already registered, and accepting new project proposals in the coming few days.

We are going to be a little strict on accepting proposals. A Project has to be something that is going to add to the XGI (and Efika) platform and development for XGI in general. "Testing" is not a project :)

Obviously projects submitted by developers who already have a Pegasos or Efika will be fast tracked - by that, we mean chosen and approved first and above and beyond developers who require more hardware support.

We will also be looking into approving projects which do NOT directly pertain to Power Architecture or Efika development; drivers on x86 or SPARC for example.

Aside from the projects program we are also looking for developers who wish to maintain and generally keep up appearances on the XGI driver set. Currently we offer a Linux kernel framebuffer, DRM module and an X.org 2D driver. The 3D (DRI) driver is binary-only but will be properly opensourced soon. All of these drivers need maintenance and generally the best idea would be to clean them up and submit them to the relevant mainlines (linux-fbdev, linux-drm teams, X.org teams) so anyone can just use them.

* Linux kernel XGI maintainer
* X.org XGI maintainer

Here is a little start to the discussion and ideas process, a few ideas you can steal and make proposals with. We'd be very excited if any of these actually got done. Any driver work obviously needs documentation and we are working with XGI to get the NDA thing speeded up and the documentation to Projects participants.

* DirectFB driver
This would be good because Debian's installer uses GTK over DirectFB. An accelerated driver makes the whole install process smoother. DirectFB also is capable of handling 3D graphics and so on - great if you want full screen applications without the overhead of X11.

* Qtopia Core
Formerly Qt/Embedded. This would be great since Qtopia is basically the best option for mobile phone and PDA development on Linux. Qt 3.3 used to have a swath of accelerated drivers for practically dead cards. Time to bring it up to date! EGL support might be nice, too :)

* Improving the Xv/XvMC driver
XGI cards come with a decent MPEG2 acceleration engine. The X.org drivers currently present this. However the XGI cards also come with a decent 3D engine which will display YUV data; with the advent of 3D windowing systems like Compiz and Beryl, a simple overlay is no longer relevant. Latest nVidia binary X drivers use the 3D engine to great effect, applying pixel shaders so sharpen and improve video playback.

I'm gonna think of some more thoughts on this and post them in this forum. If you have any ideas you want to see anyone else pick up and propose, here is the place.

Thanks,

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Matt Sealey

Cool !
I've just seen that my project was accepted :-)

A few questions :
- when will the board be sent to approved projects developers ?
- is there any information (yet) about a MorphOS XGI driver support or are you waiting for a project proposal ?
- do we have pixel/vertex shaders support with the current XGI's 3D PPC Linux binary drivers ?

Your board (and the other few guys) may go out pretty soon. As for the vaster number of projects to be submitted next week and approved for the coming weeks, that's dependant on production (Genesi are going to be building XGI boards :)
We'll get boards to the MorphOS team as and when. Since the ATI Radeon is becoming a rare artefact, we really need to focus on support of a sustainable graphics chip. XGI V3XE is it, since as mentioned in Bill's blog and now here, Genesi is building XGI V3XE cards for it's own use for the forseeable future, and we have high hopes for an integrated Efika with an XGI chip.
You know, I am not sure, but if it isn't, that's worth a project. I'll find out for you.

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Matt Sealey

About the drivers, I have another question (close to the third one asked before) :
What OpenGL version are the current XGI drivers compliant with ?

thanks ;-)

According to all sources the V3XT has the same shader engine as the higher end cards (DirectX PS2.0 and VS2.0 compliant).

The DRI driver currently reports a GLSL version of 1.10.0 which corresponds with OpenGL 2.0 (or GL 1.5 with shaders) - what I couldn't tell you is exactly what is enabled for the V3XE over the V5 or V8 chipsets XGI also produce, what quirks it has or what bugs it may also have, and XGI have also removed the shaders as a feature from their product page. That's pretty confusing, but we are working to resolve this and work out exactly what's on the chipset and what can be exposed and where the drivers fall down.

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Matt Sealey

OK, thanks for investigating :-)

I wanted to introduce myself; I am Virginia Quance - US Sales Engineer. XGI is glad to be part of this and checking into the question and comments thus far.

Kindly, Virginia

p.s. I am out of the office for holiday for the next week, but I will be following up this once I return.

Hi !

Searching for more info about the XGI V3XE, I've found this interesting page witch contains V3XE open source 2D drivers and a few docs (txt and PDF):
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8611
Among other things, the readme says that the GPU is compliant with OpenGL 1.4 spec.

I have a few questions (for Virginia and/or Matt):
The 2D open source driver is dated from Aug 2006 and for Freescale M7448@1.25 platform. Is it the latest one that can be downloaded for Efika/MPC5200B ?

I couldn't find the 3D binary driver. Where can I download it (and the associated readme file) ?

In fact, do I have to sign the NDA to have access to more info/files/ressources on the http://developer.xgitech.com/modules/ti ... .php?id=19 page ?

Thanks

Geoffrey,

In case you lost your vision or the use of scrollbars o the front page of this very site,

http://www.powerdeveloper.org/platforms/xgi/

There are a bunch of links to all this data, right in front of you.

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Matt Sealey

ooops sorry !
I didn't see this update (I thought there were docs only) :-)

The docs I put up last week, the source code have been there since Christmas. Right on the front page.

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Matt Sealey

We are probably going to shut this program down for lack of support from XGI.

Objections?

R&B :)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Please make any "last moment" suggestions!

We are about to make a major step.

We would like to consider all potential effort.

Please post or send us an email.

Thanks.

R&B :)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

I am very sad to read this from you, BBRV.

But I understand. You sent us an Open Client
with XGI card for our latest PUSH and it was
really hard to even get the XGI card to run
in Debian with X.org 7. I understand that the
driver you had was only working with old X.org.

When I put in a normal Radeon 9200 SE everything
worked just fine, just like with the Pegasos.

If this was due to lack of support from XGI, I
understand your decision. I understand that it
must be very hard to get support from graphic
card developers for Genesi.

I think you guys should focus on ATi. The open
source Radeon-driver is pretty good, actually.
It works for XGL/Compiz and I doubt much else
is necessary on PowerPC. The desktop market for
PowerPC is minimal anyway.

How is it going with your work on PowerVR?
Which company is behind that graphics engine?

If that is the case, why bother with desktop-class graphics - or even bother with graphics chips at all?

The primary problem with supporting ATI is that they simply do not produce or support the chipsets that are capable of being plugged in as PCI or AGP graphics cards to any of our current or future systems.

Until we make a PCI Express capable system, that is going to be true, and the chipsets will still be far less than available to us.

It would be far more prudent for Genesi to be completely graphics-chip-agnostic and simply offer the most basic, rudimentary support for any bundled graphics cards.

It is not so much that XGI didn't support us - they bent over backwards, but it just could never be enough to support what people expect from graphics chips. The gap between the open source and proprietary drivers, the amount of work required to bring features up to scratch, was just far too huge for the size of the project.

We simply do not want to play this game anymore. And you guys are perfectly capable of supporting yourselves.
Freescale. They licensed the IP core from Imagination Technologies. Most of the driver work will come from Freescale and their licensors, and we will just package it where necessary for users. It's not Open Source, it probably won't run Compiz.. but, then it is not a desktop-class graphics solution..

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Matt Sealey