Bug 2088

Summary: AMD/NSC Geode driver integration
Product: xorg Reporter: Adam Jackson <ajax>
Component: Driver/geodeAssignee: Xorg Project Team <xorg-team>
Status: RESOLVED MOVED QA Contact: Xorg Project Team <xorg-team>
Severity: normal    
Priority: medium CC: alexdeucher, erik.andren, martin-eric.racine, rene
Version: unspecified   
Hardware: x86 (IA32)   
OS: Linux (All)   
Whiteboard:
i915 platform: i915 features:
Bug Depends on:    
Bug Blocks: 1903    

Description Adam Jackson 2004-12-15 17:46:59 UTC
The Geode series chips are embedded graphics solutions, formerly from National
Semiconductor and currently sold by AMD.  AMD has various X drivers for the
Geode series on its website:

http://www.amd.com/us-en/ConnectivitySolutions/ProductInformation/0,,50_2330_9863_11363,00.html

There is also a Geode driver on the geode-0-0-1-branch of DRI's xc tree, last
touched by Alah Hourihane sometime in 2002.

There is already an nsc(4) driver in the tree, which supports much of the same
hardware (but perhaps not all).  Someone should investigate AMD's drivers and,
if they provide any additional support, merge them to the tree.
Comment 1 Adam Jackson 2005-01-25 17:03:49 UTC
there is some overlap here with the cyrix driver.  mharris claims the two have
the same pci ids and can only be distinguished by runtime probing.
Comment 2 René Rebe 2005-12-11 02:55:01 UTC
I have a Geode LX here and the AMD driver is indeed based on the former NSC one. I'll 
try to merge the basic code into the nsc driver. However the AMD driver has a pile 
bunch of other code and video input/output hickup I'll not look into in the first merge. 
Comment 3 René Rebe 2005-12-14 00:07:17 UTC
First pass merge done, including fixing segfaulting XVideo acceleration (work-arounded 
so far), support for RGBA HW cursor and include define fixes to build properly in the  
modular tree. Patches at: 
 
http://dl.exactcode.de/oss/xorg/ 
 
Current is: 
 
http://dl.exactcode.de/oss/xorg/nsc-amd-geode-lx-R4.patch 
 
which I'll now torture for some days ... ,-) 
Comment 4 René Rebe 2005-12-14 23:08:31 UTC
Rotation support for RGBA cursors: 
 
  http://dl.exactcode.de/oss/xorg/nsc-amd-geode-lx-R5.patch 
 
I'll request an account and commit it after 6.9/7.0 and continue 
to publish snapshots in the download area until then. 
 
So far only outstanding: XVideo acceleration is just black with 
a rotated screen. 
Comment 5 Erik Andren 2006-04-20 07:19:06 UTC
René, any progress on this driver?
Comment 6 Daniel Stone 2007-02-27 01:24:50 UTC
Sorry about the phenomenal bug spam, guys.  Adding xorg-team@ to the QA contact so bugs don't get lost in future.
Comment 7 Antti Andreimann 2007-05-23 16:06:13 UTC
The AMD driver from their GIT tree at least does not support GX1 chips such as Geode SC2200. For LX boards it works OK. However it's currently broken on LX700 and Xserver 1.3.0.0.
Comment 8 Martin-Éric Racine 2008-01-03 10:06:17 UTC
The driver for GX/LX is broken with X server 1.3 or newer because it uses x86emu whereas all previous X servers used vm86. It affects BIOS polling in a number of ways.

Note that merging support for older GX1 and SC Geodes would indeed be possible, if the driver is further subdivided into common functionalities and chipset-specific support components, the same way that GX and LX specific features have their own files, which material common to both is simply included.

See the X.org wiki for details.
Comment 9 Martin-Éric Racine 2008-03-07 15:13:38 UTC
The breakage on X server >= 1.3 indeed is due to the x86emu component. See https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14332 for 3 patches to resolve this.
Comment 10 Martin-Éric Racine 2014-10-30 10:21:45 UTC
René, has there been any progress on your merging efforts?

PS: the AMD driver is nowadays called xf86-video-geode.
Comment 11 GitLab Migration User 2018-08-10 20:42:09 UTC
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message --

This bug has been migrated to freedesktop.org's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity.

You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-geode/issues/1.

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