headless Dell servers, Matrox

[Matthew Barron]

Hi Jeff,

Your questions are good. Let me try to answer them to the best of my
knowledge.

1) Yes, almost certainly. The last Matrox cards with open drivers were
based on the G450 and G550, which top out around OpenGL 1.3 or so. I am
guessing (and admit I'm shooting from the hip here) that the integrated
video is some kind of server motherboard-provided G200 IGP, which is very
quaint by modern DRM standards and has been deprecated. I expect *llvmpipe*
would deliver a more consistent experience now, if it wouldn't create too
much CPU load. Was the OpenGL running a GUI compositor, or something more
demanding?
2) Can't say that I have. Even cajoling the Matrox M9120 I played with for
a while into cooperating with a modern-ish Linux distribution with closed
drivers was a headache, and I haven't used a G400 in Linux in roughly 20
years.
3) You are probably at the leading edge of modern Matrox users dealing with
these issues, unfortunately. But I hope I'm wrong and someone else here has
better advice...

Best wishes,
Matt

On Mon, Feb 10, 2025 at 9:40 AM Jeff Berry <Jeff.Berry at mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk>
wrote:

> Good afternoon,
>
>
>
> I'm hoping this is a good place to seek some guidance.  We've got a set of
> Dell rack servers that we run headless.  We'd been using CentOS 7 and were
> able to get OpenGL running via vnc or x2go.  We are upgrading our cluster
> to Ubuntu 24, and now the OpenGL is not running.  After running around in
> circles and chasing down various leads, I suspect the problem is that mesa
> no longer supports the Matrox cards which the Dell racks are using.  (If
> someone has a better idea, I'd love to hear it!)   I can get OpenGL sort of
> working if I stick a bunch of old GL and  Mesa libs in a directory and set
> that up using LD_LIBRARY_PATH, but that's not ideal.  (And doesn't really
> work very well.)
>
>
>
>
>
> The docs (https://docs.mesa3d.org/systems.html) say that Matrox  is
> deprecated but ' If anyone’s interested though, the code can be found in
> the Git repo.'
>
>
>
> My questions are roughly:
>
> 1)      am I off base in thinking this is probably the issue?
>
> a)       if so, what else should I be looking at?
>
> 2)      has anyone had a similar issue and tried to get the Matrox
> drivers built for later versions of Mesa
>
> a)       if so, any pointers?
>
> 3)      more generally, are there pointers or docs on where to get the
> code and how to integrate it?  git is not something I use much, and
> although I had poke at it, I've not got a good idea of where to get the
> code.
>
>
>
>
>
> Hoping that someone can point me in the right direction ...
>
>
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Jeff Berry, MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit
>
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