framebuffer drivers, sound

Hi,

I tried out the latest kernel and debian packages on my 712/60, and its running
now for three days without crash, you really made amazing progress the last few month!

The stifb driver is working for me, but the colors are completely wrong and the
system crashes if i try to cat /dev/fb0.

I wonder if HP will release specs, we could write framebuffer drivers that talk
directly to the gfx card, allow mode switching and (is it possible?) set a linear
mode instead of a planed mode.

The harmony driver does not work for me, if I try to play sound, I get silence
and then after a few seconds a stange noise, then silence, then strange noise
and so on.

anyway, keep up the good work!

Andreas

Yup, the stifb is buggy. Please, if you have time, it would be great if you could help clean it up and get it working. sticon works rather better but it is still not great. The STI docs are publically available from the documentation page.

Revolutions do not require corporate support.

I hope that I will find the time, but I cant promise anything.

well, sticon has correct colors, but works worse than stifb (swiching a vt does not redraw the whole screen, dselect is not usable ...)

Yeah, the STI docs.... HP should release the hardware level docs, this is the only way to implement a full featured fbdev driver. A stifb would still be usefull since it is works for every HP gfxcard with STI BIOS, but a special driver for each gfxcard would be nice to have things like mode switching.

Andreas - "I want color recovery!!!" ;-)

yeah, but right now we're all too busy working on important things (eg SMP, glibc, etc) to spend time looking for or sanitising this documentation.

Revolutions do not require corporate support.

As long as it gets released eventually -- my guess is X isn't going to be all that fast on a planar FB where you can only write one planemask at a time and must use a BIOS call to switch the planemask. :-)

--
Brian S. Julin

Hi,

I had hacked up a stifb driver for my 715/64 (Artist GFX card) a few weeks ago, which will give you at least correct colors. If you want to test it you may download the current (unfinished and ugly!) version from ftp://people.redhat.com/hdeller/parisc_stifb ,
put both files in /drivers/video/sti and recompile.
This version is based on the XFree86-sources and doesn't fix the cat/dev/fb0 problem yet.

Greetings,
Helge

it works for me. colors are nice again. Why isnt your patch merged in?

I added
disp->scrollmode = SCROLL_YREDRAW;
at the end of sti_set_disp() in stifb.c

this makes scrolling A LOT faster.

Andreas

Hi Andreas,

the reasons why I haven't checked it in yet are:
1. currently it's an ugly hack,
2. it's still a hack,
3. it only supports artist gfx's (some 712/xxx and 715/xxx machines) atm,
4. I would like to test it more and clean up the sources before I commit it.

Thanks for the SCROLL_YREDRAW patch. I will upload the updated version to the above ftp-site as soon as I have tested it.

Greetings,
Helge

[CC'd parisc-linux list]

Yes.
Xavier Debacker from the ESIEE Team told me, that this driver worked on his 715/80.

Greetings,
Helge

Andi wrote:

Hum, I tried the driver on a 712/60. Seems ok for me. I found neither madplay nor saydate packaged. Could you tell me the exact location (or package name) where you found them?

About mpg123, how did you compile it? When I did it 3 months ago I had to do some modifications on. I'll be very interested to know how you did.

About saytime, let say it's logical, harmony_audio_poll isn't yet implemented.
Upgrade of harmony is on the whishlist, and I hope I'll have time to complete it.

Btw, what are the frequencies of you mp3?
More over, could you test .au files with cat?

Thank for your feedback,
Matthieu

Matthieu Delahaye
ESIEE Team
http://mkhppa1.esiee.fr/

they are in the official debian distribution... you can grab them from:

ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/m/mad/ ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/s/saydate/ ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/s/saytime/

I made no modifications to the program itself, I just tweaked the makefiles a bit.

I dont know, what frequencies does harmony support?

I had the same problem here.