radeon, M22 X300, a pair of monitors, and maximizing resolution with good performance

[Thomas Vaughan]

On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 2:11 AM, Michel Dänzer
<michel at tungstengraphics.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 2008-03-28 at 09:08 +0100, Michel Dänzer wrote:
> > On Thu, 2008-03-27 at 21:18 -0600, Thomas Vaughan wrote:
> > >
> > > So I thought that I might just rotate my two monitors and make a
> > > virtual desktop of 2400x1600.

Just to be clear---in case anyone might be confused by my sloppy
wording---I rotated clockwise each of the two 1600x1200 LCD panels
attached to my docking station.  Then I used 'Option "Rotate" "Left"' on
each of them.  With side-by-side monitors, each in portrait orientation
(instead of the usual landscape orientation), my virtual desktop size
was then 2400x1600.

Also, for anyone else in this conversation, I don't belong to the list.

> > > The problem that I encountered, however, was of painfully slow
> > > performance, even for ordinary 2D operations, like moving a
> > > window.  Is there any way of setting up a pair of monitors in
> > > portrait mode with decent 2D and 3D acceleration, or is this just
> > > not supported?
> >
> > I think it should be possible, but you need to make sure to use EXA
> > instead of XAA and that you use something close to current upstream
> > Git - xserver-xorg-video-ati from experimental may or may not fit
> > the bill.

Thanks!

I'll fetch the relevant debs from experimental with a Web browser.  I'm
an old guy who still uses dselect for package stuff, and I can never
remember how to use apt (to "pin" or whatever) the right bits from
experimental.

I suppose that there's an Option to use in xorg.conf to enable EXA
instead of XAA.

> On second thought, I'm afraid this won't help as the 3D engine
> probably only supports textures up to 2048x2048.

Well, that would matter (hopefully) only if I actually wanted to use
textures bigger than 2048x2048.  Perhaps it would affect me if I wanted
to use a big texture for the whole virtual desktop.

Doesn't compiz do something like that?  Although running compiz would be
nice, I just want my screen saver and ordinary OpenGL apps to work
without putting garbage onto the screen.

Anyway, would it be a huge pain for me to check out the source and build
it myself?  I use cvs and subversion a lot at work, but I've never
messed with git.  Also, I do embedded programming in C at work.  Is
there a huge learning curve in coming up to speed on the source and
build system for what Debian calls xserver-xorg-video-ati?  I'm not
opposed to playing around with it, but my time is limited enough so that
I probably can't afford to climb a huge learning curve.

-- 
Thomas E. Vaughan