Zadok_Allan writes “It’s a bit late but since many readers will remember the SGI O2 fondly this might interest a few. The gist of the story is — NetBSD now supports hardware accelerated graphics on the O2 both in X and in the kernel. We didn’t get any help from SGI, the documention available doesn’t go beyond a general description and a little theory of operation which is why it took so long to figure it out. The X driver is still has a few rough edges ( all the acceleration frameworks pretty much expect a mappable linear framebuffer, if you don’t have one — like on most SGI hardware — you’ll have to jump thorugh a lot of hoops and make sure there’s no falling back to cfb and friends) but it supports XRENDER well enough to run KDE 3.5. Yes, it’s usable on a 200MHz R5k O2. Not quite as snappy as a any modern hardware but nowhere near as sluggish as you’d expect and since Xsgi doesn’t support any kind of XRENDER support, let alone hardware acceleration, pretty much anything using anti-aliased fonts gets a huge performance boost out of this compared to IRIX.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
