[Openchrome-users] VIA Chrome 9

[Pavel Krejcir]

Hello everybody,

I've got an MSI board with VIA chipset VT3230, with integrated graphics 
card K8M890. After some investigation I've found a 2D driver supported 
by OpenChrome, and realized that neither a 3D binary driver nor a 3D 
specification has been published by VIA, and it is likely that it never 
will be. (Not sure what "Vista Certified" really means, I'm afraid that 
it could be decrypted as "The vendor promises that free software will 
never be supplied with appropriate information.")

I apologize for a bit lengthy  description at this point, I want to be 
sure that they who are interested in will properly understand what I am 
actually asking for.

Well, since I would sometimes like to have a 3D acceleration, a simple 
solution might be to buy another graphics card which I could be sure a 
driver exists for. On the other hand, this is not a critical problem for 
me. I will probably never use the 3D acceleration heavily, sometimes try 
to draw some things in Blender, nothing more. Of course, this is still 
possible with disabling DRI, but direct rendering would be better. I 
believe the card is not as bad as stated on some forums, and for this 
purpose should be fully sufficient.

So I started to investigate the problem a bit. I decided not to ask 
anything on any forum prior getting some basic knowledge. After few 
weeks I know that the direct rendering for this card is disabled in DRM. 
I can locate the point and switch it on. After recompiling, installing 
drm.ko and via.ko and reloading the system, the X gets frozen every time 
I start the screen saver settings, or run glxinfo. The X is frozen so 
much that even "Ctrl-Alt-Backspace" does not help. That's fine, and I 
expect it to do this. I have another computer in LAN so I can safely 
reboot the affected machine via telnet. I am prepared for real debugging.

Eventually I start to approach the proper topic of this message. I am a 
little bit stacked now. I know that parsing of the buffer does not cause 
the crash, it is caused by something called next, when the buffer 
parsing returns OK. I know that the buffer parsing is called somewhere 
from mesa, but I cannot compile mesa. There is some syntax error in a 
module probably not used by my computer at all. I should be able to 
overcome this and compile mesa in the end, but I am not sure whether it 
is even necessary.

There are at least three components - drm, mesa and openchrome - which 
somehow collaborate and I do not fully understand how. My guess is that 
I should focus rather on openchrome than on mesa. So what I really need 
is if somebody can shed any light on drm-openchrome relationship. What 
library is loaded in order to parse openGL instruction into the driver 
command buffer? Is it unichrome_dri.so, or should it be a via_dri.so 
(which does not exist on my machine)?

If you manage to read it through here then you probably guess that I am 
ready to experiment with my hardware. I want to try anything I can, 
however foolish it might appear. So I will appreciate any kind of 
information from anybody who is willing to share it.

Thanks in advance.

Pavel