Video Cards et. al.

[mikebw at colossus.bilow.com (Mike Bilow)]

The frame buffer code in the kernel was munged for quite some time.  You
might make sure you are using the latest kernel and rebuild it yourself.

There is no particular reason that your PCI card wants an IRQ.  Video
cards reserve IRQs mostly for EGA compatibility mode.  If you go into your
CMOS setup and deny the use of an IRQ to the PCI card, it would probably
work perfectly well as long as you never actually try to put the card into
EGA mode (which XFree86 does not support).  Generally, video cards like to
have an IRQ to use for signalling the vertical blanking interval, which is
about as close to totally useless as you get in the modern world.

Of course, you could get a motherboard with IO-APIC support.  Look where
my SCSI controller and Ethernet card ended up:

06:35:40 colossus:~$ less /proc/interrupts
           CPU0       CPU1
  0:   11358987          0          XT-PIC  timer
  1:          8          0    IO-APIC-edge  keyboard
  2:          0          0          XT-PIC  cascade
  8:          0          2    IO-APIC-edge  rtc
 13:          1          0          XT-PIC  fpu
 14:          2          5    IO-APIC-edge  ide0
 17:     187961     187862   IO-APIC-level  aic7xxx
 18:     283928     284385   IO-APIC-level  Intel EtherExpress Pro 10/100

-- Mike


On Fri, 17 Mar 2000, Jerry Feldman wrote:

> Since I upgraded to SuSE 6.3, I have been having some troubles with my graphics card, and I think I finally tracked it down. I have a 4M ATI Mach64 AGP. The problem appears to be related to the Vesa frame buffer. I put in an 8M xpert98 PCI (which causes an IRQ conflict), and the problems I had been obsering went away.  SuSE 6.3 uses XFree86 3.3.5. I don't generally play video games on my Linux system, but I want to upgrade to a good board, and I would like some recommendations. I may go to the KGP show tomorrow.
> 
> Because of the lack of IRQs, I will need an AGP based board. 
> Chistoph recommended a VooDoo.  I was just checking some prices for comparison (Linux.com):
> 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 W/TV Out AGP $146.
> Diamond Stealth  S540 32MB 4x Savage 4 Pro $94
> Diamond Viper V770 AGP 4X 32MB NVIDIA TNT $124.
> ATI All In Wonder 128 16MB AGP $178., 32MB $245.
> 
> I have not checked other online resources, but I would like opinions pro/con. 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
> Boston Linux and Unix user group
> http://www.blu.org


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