[indiana-discuss] [xwin-discuss] Xorg transition from XSun on SPARC

[Frank Middleton]

On 03/30/09 10:00, Martin Bochnig wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 2:19 PM, Frank Middleton wrote:
>> The X86 experiment was just to see if we could replace Fedora
>> with Solaris on a couple of old X86 boxes we use as X terminals.
>> Apparently not (at least when using the Live X86 CD) since X doesn't
>> seem to be able to bind to its from address.

> What??
> Of course you can.
> Maybe you cought a bug. Normally it should work. Did you try
>"ssh -X host" ??

gdm won't run properly at all on that machine. It gets as far as
displaying the top and bottom panels, then it cleans them out and
displays an empty dialog box called "Error". The CD keeps wooshing
away for at least 10 minutes until I give up. Since there is only
384M of memory, and the minimum appears to be 512M, I have no idea
if this is a bug or not, but it precludes trying ssh -X. It is
quite repeatable.

X -query works just fine on this machine running Fedora, although
it segfaults occasionally (and repeatably).  It fails with the
Solaris Live CD booted to text mode - supplying the -from parameter
results in an "unable to bind to from address" message, which
is either a bug, some kind of security setting I have been unable
to fathom, or a missing service.

After X -query fails, the keyboard goes into a weird mode, as if it
were echoing a 9600bps line at 50baud. Since there is no Stop-A, and
ctrl-alt-del doesn't work, at that point all you can do is power it
off, which makes testing very painful. I was able to nfs mount from
the same machine that X -query uses and hence save the Xorg.0.log,
but it doesn't show anything unusual. If nfs works, surely X -query
should too?

Unfortunately the Live CD doesn't recognize the ethernet adapter on
my laptop, so there isn't much interesting to do there either. It does
correctly install the Radeon video driver, but the gui for editing
xorg.conf doesn't seem to want to allow for dual monitors. If a
second monitor is attached, the laptop display is completely absent
from the monitor list. Editing xorg.conf by hand resulted only in X
segfaulting. This machine also runs FC10-X64 reasonably well, and
X -query works from FC10 quite stably.

On a side note, both SPARC Solaris and X86 Fedora screen savers
eventually crash gdm, on every machine I have. I suppose it is because
they have memory leaks. Whose Bugzilla does this problem go to? :-)

>> I read that the Sun ffb and afb devices are already supported.

> Yes. Work like a charm. Also in the new xserver version which will
> ship with 2009.06, namely 1.5.3. ONLY BAD NEWS: MANAGEMENT HAS NO
> PLANS TO MERGE IN fox-gate. Without the fox-gate's special SPARC
> enhancements, the server shipping as PART OF 2009.06 WILL NOT EVEN
> DETECT UPA CARDS. SOS, HELP, *PLEASE*:  I hope MANAGEMENT CHANGE THEIR
> MIND. Otherwise afb- and ffb- support can only be provided, if I set
> up an IPS repo somewhere on one of my private sites. So please nail
> Sun with questions like this, this saves you and others like you and
> even Sun much trouble, then.

I doubt that I have any more influence than you do, but Sun probably
realizes that its most energetic fans are amongst those that will
have problems when XSun is EOL'd. But it sounds like even if they
don't, all is not lost, thanks to you! But I really can't understand
why they couldn't at least host your repo on opensolaris.org. Maybe
someone from Sun can answer this?

We will start Xorg testing after installing snv111 or 112, or when the
2009.06 release comes out. Thanks again...