ARM Blog

In my earlier post I stated that you should not do a “dist-upgrade” of Debian Sid, due to the fact that the XGI driver will be removed then.

I took the risk to do the dist-upgrade and let the driver be removed. The reason I wanted to do the upgrade is the major version difference between the Xserver and wanted to see if there were any issues regarding display and performance.
After searching alot I came across the “fbdev” driver which delivers non-accelerated 2D views just as the XGI driver does. One major point to try different video drivers is that the XGI driver has lots of bugs and is not able to work with the newer Xserver releases.

Upgrading:
So, if you want to check out the fbdev driver for yourself, you can issue the following steps:
1. Open up a terminal on your t5325.
2. First update your packagelist:
apt-get update
3. Second, issue a normal upgrade (not necessary but never hurts):
apt-get upgrade
4. Third, issue the dist-upgrade and confirm the removal of the XGI driver:
apt-get dist-upgrade
5. When the upgrade is finished, start your favorite editor (vim in my case) and open the xorg.conf file:
vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf
6. Search for the line where the “xgi” driver is loaded and change (and save) that:
Driver "fbdev"
7. Now restart the display manager (in my case GDM3):
/etc/init.d/gdm3 restart

Resolution issues:
If you have troubles with your screen resolution after this upgrade / fix, there are some options that need to be set in your xorg.xonf.
Also note that the given identifiers have to match the sections in your xorg.conf file.
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Primary Screen"
Device "Driver0"
Monitor "Primary Monitor"
DefaultDepth 16
SubSection "Display"
Depth 8
Modes "1440x900" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 16
Modes "1440x900" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
EndSection
Also note that the 16 bit depth is given here. The XGI chip is not functioning very well with 24 bit depth and becomes horribly slow.
Please append the screen resolution to your monitor capabilities.

Apple Cinema Display
One major issue I detected was when using my Cinema Display from Apple on the t5325. With the XGI driver it detects the EDID by itself and configures the resolution automatically. When I’ve issued the upgrade and set it to fbdev, there will be no screen anymore and the white power led keeps flashing…
As I wanted to test this behaviour, I’ve hooked up an old Acer AL1916W (1440×900) via DVI -> VGA and instant gave screen!
As for now it seems that the Cinema Display is not working well with the fbdev driver, which possibly could be a simple setting in xorg.conf, although I did not found any fix for this yet!

Performance with fbdev
As stated at the beginning: there is no acceleration available in this driver. As far as I can tell, the performance between fbdev and xgi is the same, although I see less glitching and tearing when using the fbdev driver. Since the performance is equal, I suggest upgrading and using this driver. At least it’s a driver that’s being worked on actively and not a dead driver like the XGI one.

Sampe xorg.conf
I’ve provided my working xorg.conf for reference and is available on my downloadpage. Please adjust the resolution to the ones corresponding with your monitor.