Date: Mon, 24 Aug 1998 15:33:14 +0200 From: Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org> To: "Christopher R. Bowman" <crb@ChrisBowman.com>, "M. L. Dodson" <bdodson@beowulf.utmb.edu> Cc: Harold Gutch <logix@foobar.franken.de>, Donald Burr <dburr@pobox.com>, FreeBSD Multimedia <freebsd-multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: 3dfx thingie (GLIDE) for FreeBSD? Message-ID: <19980824153314.A29290@cons.org> In-Reply-To: <199808141819.NAA02017@quark.ChrisBowman.com>; from Christopher R. Bowman on Fri, Aug 14, 1998 at 01:15:51PM -0400 References: <19980814111944.50903@foobar.franken.de> <XFMail.980814001430.dburr@pobox.com> <19980814111944.50903@foobar.franken.de> <199808141335.IAA16604@beowulf.utmb.edu> <199808141819.NAA02017@quark.ChrisBowman.com>
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In <199808141819.NAA02017@quark.ChrisBowman.com>, Christopher R. Bowman wrote: > >This would not include a hardware-accelerated Mesa integration > >would it? I use SGIs for scientific computation, and would > >really like to be able to recompile some of that software to run > >on my personal FreeBSD wksta. Unaccelerated Mesa is just > >inadequate to the task (XIG Matrox Millenium II video, PPro 200). > > Yes it would, that's the whole reason to port the glide layer to FreeBSD, > cause then you can take advantage of Mesas already existent support for the > glide layer and run OpenGL using hardware acceleration. I have even heard > that the current Linux glide layer can be run on FreeBSD under emulation, > though I would make sure before I went out and bought a card. 3dfx doesn't put out documentation about accessing their chipset directly. They provide an API named "glide" and binary implementations of this API. Currently, the Linux implementation of this API is a shared library. Thus, you will have userlevel programs that needs access to the hardware which in turn means you will have to run them as root or setuid root. This is what Mesa currently uses. You can use it on FreeBSD, but all programs and all libararies used by these programs have to be Linux binaries as well. Usually, you can build these easily on FreeBSD by using the emulators/linux-devel port. The interesting thing is a "real" kernel driver. As I understand you may sign an agreement with 3dfx so that they give you enough documentation/example source(?) to build and distribute such a driver in binary form. Kevin Day and Kurt Olsen said they did so, but I didn't see an announcement of a driver yet. As far as I know, the Linux folks didn't go any further as well. The thing zoid is working on isn't a Glide->Hardware interface, but a OpenGL->Glide thing, a lighter replacement for Mesa. The current /dev/3dfx entry isn't an interface to the 3d rendering hardware, but just a permission granting hook like FreeBSD's /dev/io. You still need to link your binary against a library translating some API to 3dfx hardware operations, where the old (2.41) binary shared library is still the only otion on Linux. Martin -- %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org> http://www.cons.org/cracauer BSD User Group Hamburg, Germany http://www.bsdhh.org/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-multimedia" in the body of the message
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