2.5.68 state of matroxfb
I'm just wondering what the state of the matroxfb driver is and why it's an option in the kernel when it's completely uncompilable and has been for many months. I know it requires patches to work and i was under the assumption that these patches were at linux-fbdev.org but that site has been down for the past few days i've tried to access it and with no documentation updates about the new matroxfb driver since 2.4, I've been unable to verify if this is the only place to find the matroxfb patches.
So what i'm getting at is why is there a matroxfb option in the
current kernel when the driver isn't there and what the future/current situation is with the framebuffer driver. I'd like to get the most hardware support for video output as possible and it seems like the mga (mplayer) driver built on top of the fb driver is the way to do that and since my Nvidia card is twice as fast at X operations as my G450, I was assuming that the 2.5 fb code was just much better than the 2.4 fb code since I use the nvidia fb driver in 2.5 with X using the nvidia driver (Xfree's ). I've never been able to test that theory though because i've never been able to build 2.5's matroxfb.
Quoted 3 lines · On Tue, 22 Apr 2003 16:53:02 -0400 Ed Sweetman <[email protected]> wrote:
I'm just wondering what the state of the matroxfb driver is and why it's an option in the kernel when it's completely uncompilable and has been for many months.
Easy. A lot of FB stuff has been nonworking at various stages, since the whole console layer has been more or less rewritten over the course of 2.5. (Of course, a lot of kernel internals have changed, so entire *CPU architectures* have been uncompilable for significant periods of time.)
Quoted 5 lines
I know it requires patches to work and i was under the assumption that these patches were at linux-fbdev.org but that site has been down for the past few days i've tried to access it and with no documentation updates about the new matroxfb driver since 2.4, I've been unable to verify if this is the only place to find the matroxfb patches.
A search of message archives via groups.google.com yields this site quite quickly:
ftp://platan.vc.cvut.cz/pub/linux/matrox-latest
Please also read this message from two days ago:
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=matroxfb+group:fa.linux.kernel&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&as_drrb=b&as_mind=12&as_minm=9&as_miny=2002&as_maxd=22&as_maxm=4&as_maxy=2003&selm=fa.eu6ulqe.4l2eo4%40ifi.uio.no&rnum=6
Quoted 3 lines
So what i'm getting at is why is there a matroxfb option in the
current kernel when the driver isn't there and what the future/current situation is with the framebuffer driver.
Because, it seems, support is planned but there hasn't been time to get all the issues hammered out. (A lot of kernel devs still are volunteers that have to do this in whatever free time they have, between actual jobs or, sometimes more importantly, between searching for jobs, so things don't always happen instantly.)
You might be able to get a feel for the future/current situation of the fb code if you had a read through your favorite lkml archive, if you're not subscribed. It looks like the questions or doubts you bring up in this mail would be answered by doing so.
Matt