Video driver of SM502 for Xorg

[Clemens Koller]

Hi, Belcon!

Very nice to see some guys from Silicon Motion on the list!

> The driver named
> siliconmotion_drv.so which is delivered with the package
> xorg-x11-drv-siliconmotion is used to support chip SM712.

...and other VGA compatible chips from Silicon Motion Inc.

> The attached
> driver is used for SM502 which is much powerful than SM712.

The SM501 is the predecessor of the SM502.
The SM502 is considered as compatible drop-in replacement for the SM501.
Both are not VGA compatible and we use seperate drivers for the SM50x,
currently maintained by Alex Deucher:

http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=users/agd5f/xf86-video-smi501.git;a=summary

 > But this driver
> has some bugs with SM712 currently.

There are versions out there which have the SM50x stuff added to the
older SM7xx driver.
I consider this as a hack... so no wonder something is broken. ;-)

 > I am still working on it. Since SMI got
> several kinds chipsets, I would re-design the whole driver architecture so
> that all chipsets would be supported in one driver.

Please don't re-invent the wheel again. See the *siliconmotion and *501
drivers in the git repository:
http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/

> Please test the driver if you are interested. Don't hesitate to mail me all
> bugs that you found.

I have to workaround the bug that I cannot use the SM501/SM502 32bit RGBA modes
on PCI on PowerPC (big endian architecture) without need to swap the colors
in software. Is there any way to change the color planes in the SM50x?
(I have a solution in software, but when it's about to do proper sub-pixel
aliasing on TFT, things are messed up...)

Hardware is up and running on my side. I'm welcome to receive patches
against the smi501 driver.

> I am sorry if my poor English annoyed you since I am
> not an English-native Speaker.

You are very welcome. Please check the already available drivers.
It is not planned to merge both as far as I can tell.

Regards,
-- 
Clemens Koller
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