drivers to de-support (was: [PATCH 2/3] xorg-server.pc.in: Remove libpciaccess and pixman-1 from Requires)

[Michael]

Hello,

On Sun, 18 Sep 2011 15:56:25 +0200
Michal Suchanek <hramrach at centrum.cz> wrote:

> On 18 September 2011 03:20, Michael <macallan1888 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hello,
> 
> > Sure, I'll get there eventually ;)
> > There are some new drivers too ( for old hardware though ) which for now are kinda NetBSD-specific ( I made no real attempt to keep
> 
> > - xf86-video-crime, for the SGI O2. Register and DMA buffer mapping is NetBSD-specific and stuff like mode switching is done by the kernel driver, should be easy enough to port. The biggest 'challenge' ( if you can call it that ) on Linux would be the fact that this driver expects the framebuffer in tiled mode while Linux' kernel driver uses a trick to make it appear linear ( which the drawing engine can't deal with ). Since we use the drawing engine in the kernel as well it's always tiled and I threw out the linear hack long ago.
> 
> Is it fast enough to run at least a few xterms at decent speed?

Absolutely. Remember IRIX's winterm? That's the speed you get.
I ran KDE 3.5 on mine which wasn't anywhere near as sluggish as you'd expect form a 200MHz R5k ( ok, building it took forever but once that was over things weren't too bad )
The driver accelerates both basic colour expansion ( for xterms ) and some xrender ops, the latter helps KDE's perceived speed a lot ( actually, the reason to muck with KDE was to have a bunch of handy test cases for xrender ).

> I tried installing Debian on one of those machines once but the time
> it takes to boot is way too long. Maybe it has something to do with
> slow CPU and compressed initrd.

NetBSD boots to multiuser in about 20 seconds or so on a 200MHz R5k O2 with no 'fast init' trickery whatsoever. I have no idea what's up with recent linux to slow down the boot process.

have fun
Michael