Date: Fri, 4 May 2001 00:43:47 +0200 From: Adriaan Rossouw <adriaan@ittc.co.za> To: freebsd-emulation@freebsd.org Subject: The sordid tale of Quake3Arena, DRI and the Linuxulator Message-ID: <01050400434702.02452@Insomnia.daemon.za.org>
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Well, the topic says it all, this is what ive been sinking my last few days into, and it has been a grand experiment at that. Every answer leads to more questions, but you'll see why in a second. I own a matrox g450, which i bought mainly for the dual head features. I dont really play games (QuakeC got me hooked on programming way back, and it all went downhill from there) , but I enjoy a fresh challenge.. and after several months of using this card for X (4.0.1/2 if you must know) , i FINALLY decided to get hardware 3d up and running ( the challenges associated with this were numerous , before someone kindly patched the XFree86-4 port) , I also managed to get most of the GL ports in /usr/ports/games compiling (with the exception of XRacer.. kind of) Now, i have a working install of XFree86 4.0.3 + DRI on FreeBSD 4.3-Stable /usr/ports/games/quakeforge, compiles PERFECTLY runs as well as can be expected (50+fps at 1024X768X16bpp) considering i dont have a nvidia ge(nital)Force or something similiar. Now, onto the next Experiment, i spy the quake3demo in ports, i go now that's a nice test. Activision requires me to have a valid credit card, where is a 19 year old in a third world country (south africa) supposed to find a credit card, magically create one with a generator (yeah, right). I go, screw this. borrow a friend's quake3arena cd. (win) i go through the motions, as detailed in the numerous q3a + freebsd install faqs. by numerous i mean 3, and all aimed at XF86 3.3.6 + Utah GLX I cull <sp. kull?> the neccesary info for installing, copying and upgrading quake3 to the most recent patch , etc Now, comes the test , running it .. it requires a libGL, i link the freebsd libGL (which works) and it says wrong OS ABI. i go "makes sense.. it is 'emulating linux'. Off we go hunting for a rpm with the latest libGL, it takes me SEVERAL DAYS to find a rpm (i absolutely , totally friggin HATE RPM'S , they were one of the major reasons for me starting to use slackware (again) and then trying freebsd ) from mandrake (for 7.2) which has the neccesary file. obviously .. i dont want to install all the files.. learn how to use rpm2cpio, copy the files.. no comprende.. needs glibc 2.1.3 (linux_base 6.1 comes with glibc 2.1.2) , i go finding rpm's again (did i mention that i hate rpms?) i end up getting the update rpm to RH 6.2 i try installing. unsuccessfull , some kind of cpio error. (if you want the error ill drudge it up for you) i also manage to find a compiled version of the DRI libGL for my card (mga) on the dri site (in tgz format, go figure) i use rpm2cpio to extract the entire tree, copy it over /compat/linux/ , then run sbin/ldconfig (the compat one) now!, i finally start quake3 .. seeing the intro screen .. i go YAY!, 30 second later, im still staring at the first frame. UH OH. i get in a game (painfull, yes.. but i had t know) the space between frames gets longer.. but everything is pretty. ive tried this with a number of different libGL.so's ... same results. This is where i am currently, but I *think* i know what's going on. : *DISCLAIMER, THIS IS BASED ON MY SOMEWHAT LIMITED UNDERSTANDING OF THE FREEBSD/LINUX BINARY COMPATIBILITY LAYER* I would love for you to prove me wrong. Since the linuxulator is a binary compatibility layer, and the libGL.so's i found, were intended to be used via the linux kernel modules (which dont exist , duh) , it is basically falling back on software, without knowing it does so. It has no concept of the freebsd kernel modules (in this case mga.ko and drm.ko , and prolly agp.ko too) SO, it will run , but not with direct hardware access,, since it can't break through the abstraction layer. NOW, my first thought on this is, to write a wrapper library, which simply forwards all requests from quake3 (which is written to look like libGL ) then it sends those requests to the FreeBSD libGL, but this begs the question can one link a FreeBSD library to a Linux library (same arch however). It is doubtfull considering the state of abstraction Now, my question to this forum is, is there such a feature/functionality in the linuxulator (possibly via the linux.ko file itself) if not, should such code be written, because when the base does finally go to XF4 , i do see this becoming an issue. i have no problem writing a wrapper lib , but deeper kernel module stuff is beyond me. Yes, that's it.. ive ranted and raved long enough , any pieces of info or opinion on this subject will be appreciated. Regards Adriaan Rossouw To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-emulation" in the body of the message
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