ATI Rage128 Driver Now Has RandR Support

[DrYak]

Embed in servers

If for some reason they need an ancient system that also needs screen rotation, why not just slap in a PCI or AGP card? There are GPUs that use the AGP socket that are still updated by the open source drivers for both AMD and nvidia.

There's a very specific reason: if there's no actual AGP socket into which to put the shiny GPU. (Well, not so shiny, you have to go all the way back to Radeon 9200 your slot is 3.5 Volts only)

ATI Rage GPUs were, at some point in time, very popular on servers motherboards.
It's embed so you're stuck with it and can't change it (there's usually only 1 AGP channels used by the onboard Rage128).

(For example, one server I'm currently logged onto at the university has a Rage XL : even one generation earlier than the Rage 128. It's old, but it still does its job)

The GPU family was even present on Sun workstations (it's a Sparc cpu inside. not even Intel compatible).

As for *why* RandR is necessary:
remember that it's not only for rotation. The other R stands for Resize, and the whole randr stack is used to provide the ability to change resolution on the fly.

Which is *very* likely to happen to a server depending on to which monitor the server's display is routed by the KVM switch (if an actaully KVM is used - and not a plain monitor plugged straight in).

You don't want to need to investigate something on an old server and be welcomed by a "Signal out of range" error message, just because the screen you plugged in differs completely in timings from the last one that was plugged the previous time you needed to check something - 5 years ago.

(One of the reason you can see an old CRT kept on a tray in some server rooms - they are much more resilient to the range of timings they accept).

[energyman]

What I'd really like to know is what was the actual reason behind adding this? Even if there is anybody who is still using this GPU, why do they have the need for RandR? If for some reason they need an ancient system that also needs screen rotation, why not just slap in a PCI or AGP card? There are GPUs that use the AGP socket that are still updated by the open source drivers for both AMD and nvidia. But if for some reason they don't want to do this because it taints the history of the computer, I'm not aware of Rage supporting screen rotation in Windows either.

well, many server boards way into the 2000s had those chips as onboard graphics. So supporting them still makes sense.

[GreatEmerald]

Well r100 supports 2d, r200 2d/cubic but no 3d mipmaps... both advertise OpenGL 1.3, so he does not actually need to request for 1.4... so, some hardware can do it, but it does not have 1.4 advertised.

Yes, I know that, but there are three ways to get mipmaps and I'm using the less deprecated one. For older OpenGL versions like that it's possible to use GLU to get mipmaps, but the problem is that Derelict, the D OpenGL library, doesn't support GLU altogether. So I had to use the GL 1.4 GL_GENERATE_MIPMAP.

[Eirikr1848]

TLDR: R128 driver still sucks in 2022 for older machines with non-replaceable graphics on modern Gentoo-based or Arch-based distros geared toward legacy devices.

Thanks to Adelie Linux for PPC machines, I'm necroposting on this old R128 thread to see if there is anyone out there to help with issues re:the internal display of the G3 that uses a non-upgradeable R128 card. This is a modern Linux distro for legacy PowerPC, PowerPC64/OpenPOWER machines (not just Apple-based machines)

(Adelie is Gentoo with Alpine's APK package manager also for ARMv7, ARMv8, x86 32-bit, x86-64, and future ARMv6 support for Raspberry Pi OG)

For now: is the best thing to do to just test ArchPOWER and Adelie on the old iMac and report any issues to the Mesa git?

(What's the use-case, some always say. Well. Collectors. Collectors with the ability to theme Linux to look like macOS but use the modern web via FrogFind or Lynx. Console based or light gui-based chat protocols. IRC. RSS Feeds. Who knows. It exists, the still look neat.)