Siliconmotion driver update for XFree 4.3?

[Paulo Cesar Pereira de Andrade]

Gerhart, Bjoern wrote:
> Dear list,

  Hi,

> in the past, our company got a siliconmotion driver update to release
> 1.4.9 of the siliconmotion driver. But it seems that the features of
> the 1.4.9 release have not been given back to the xorg developer
> community. I have the source code for this release, and it can be
> compiled against XFree 4.3.

  It is not that it has not been given back, in most cases, it is
just that they lost contacts with opensource developers, or there
wasn't any developer working on integrating their patches.

  I have the latest sources from siliconmotion, and I have been on
contact with them for some time now. If you are using XFree86, probably
you will want to use that version, that you can also get from
http://www.loongson.cn/support/cgi-bin/gitweb/gitweb.cgi?p=siliconmotion/xorg;a=summary

  You may also want to check the latest freedesktop git, just run:

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-siliconmotion

  There isn't yet an official version, so you need a snapshot. But
some of the features in that driver include randr 1.2 (with multihead),
exa, basic composite accel, compatible with xorg latest xorg xserver,
etc.

> Now as we want to change to newer Linux distributions, also the Xorg
> version increases to Xorg 7.1 or newer. But: On the one hand the
> siliconmotion driver part of Xorg 7.1 does not have the features we
> had in release 1.4.9. On the other hand I can not simply recompile
> the 1.4.9 sources against Xorg 7.1.

  What features you had? Anyway, note that I am working mainly on the
smi 501/502 support, but Francisco Jerez did a lot of work for the
Lynx3D chipsets, and is the main author of several new features like
the randr 1.2 (I only adapted that code to smi 501).

  I have been working on an some experiments with a drm module for
the smi 501, the hardware doesn't have 3d support, but it has a
"batch buffer" and dma transfers from/to system/video memory, and
Francisco also did some work on implementing composite on top of
Lynx3D hardware. Hopefully that can also be integrated soon.

> Does it make sense when I create a diff between my siliconmotion
> 1.4.9 source code and the original siliconmotion source code part of
> XFree 4.3? Maybe with such a patch, there would be a simple way to
> port the new siliconmotion driver release to the current Xorg
> version?

  They are already in version 2.2.8, while we are on version 1.6.1 :-)
If you can send me the tarball it should be easier to handle, then
real diffs. As there may exist useful features that were removed...

> btw: sorry for the long signature at the bottom, it's automatically
> added  :-(
>
> Best Regards Björn

Paulo