X.org with multiple video cards

[sam williams]

Not all dual video card systems will play well together. There can be
a driver/memory initialization issue. If you are using two seperate
cards you need to run "/sbin/lspci -vv" and scan for the lines
pertinent to your two video cards. If you find them, and they are
compatible then the memory regions associated with both cards will be
enabled, if on the other hand they aren't compatible then one of the
cards will have its on-board memory disabled. If you see this there
won't be a whole lot you can do. Essentially what happens in this case
is the first polled graphics adapater will be configured properly, if
the cards or the X drivers for the card can only deal with itself,
then you'll see the first card, but be unable to configure the second.
I recently ran into this problems with a couple of Matrox cards. The
really bad thing for me occurred when I started X. The second card
gave the appearance of working. I saw a starting x-cursor, only to
have it blanked.  Its not enough to always see the cards. The driver
code has to be able to deal with multiples, which isn't alwasys the
case. BTW, the problem isn't the xfree86/xorg developers, its the
vendors of the card who chose to not share information.

Hope this helps. Really all I can offer.....

Sam


On Thu, 2 Dec 2004 20:50:20 -0500, Kaczmarek, Thaddeus
<tkaczmar at crownfin.com> wrote:
> On Dec 02, 2004 08:41 PM, Brian Fallik <baf11 at cornell.edu> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> >
> >I asked this question on the gentoo forums and didn't get any response,
> >so I'm moving upstream.
> >
> >I have an nforce2 motherboard (w/ built in video chip) in addition to a
> >nvidia GeForce4 Ti 4200. I currently have the nforce video disabled and
> >only use the 4200, which works perfectly in x-org 6.8.
> >
> >So here comes the question.
> >
> >1. Can I configure x.org (and the kernel, and udev, etc) to recognize
> >both video cards?
> >
> >2. Can I configure x.org to use the nforce2 as a secondary screen, as
> >though it were a dual head configuration? I want both screens to be
> >controlled by a single terminal/login/session.
> >
> >3. Can I have this controllable, so that it only happens occasionally?
> >In other words, the monitor I connect to the nforce2 may not always be
> >connected and I don't want any errors in this case.
> >
> >Thanks in advance!
> >
> >_______________________________________________
> 
> As long as you can see them with the xorg -scanpci  commanc you should
> be fine.
> Confirm the syntax but I think that looks right.
> 
> Ted
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