use with syscons(4) on sparc64. It's based on the respective NetBSD
driver with some additional info (initialisation/hardware cursor)
obtained from the Xorg 'ati' driver and some ideas taken from
creator(4). ATI Mach64 chips ("ATI Rage") are quite common as low-
end graphics chips in PCI-based sun4u machines and are used on-board
in e.g. Blade 100 and a couple of OEM products. Most if not all of
the Sun PGX add-on cards family (descriptions of the PGX32 are
conflicting but most say it's a Rage Pro) are also based on these
chips. Depending on the version of the OBP Mach64 cards destined for
use in i386 machines also work in sun4u machines.
The driver uses pixel mode with hardware acceleration as far as
syscons(4) currently permits on sparc64 so text mode is already
quite fast. The hardware cursor is used for the mouse pointer;
for one because this is a "restriction" induced in syscons(4) on
sparc64 by creator(4) and also because of issues with mapping
the aperture when used as a low-level early during boot. Due to
insufficiencies in the available documentation I didn't manage to
get mode switch work properly (sync problems), yet. So for now
this driver relies on the OBP having initialised a mode (as does
creator(4)). On all of the tested machines is even true when using
a serial console (and also not only when the OBP switched to a
serial console because no keyboard is present). In general however
the states the Mach64 chips are left in by the OBP vary a lot
depending on the version of the OBP. This e.g. includes the aperture
not being mapped in even when used as the console and the OBP just
barfing when asked to map it. The latter is also the reason for the
existence of this native driver in FreeBSD rather than taking an
OFW frambuffer approach.
Xorg is also happy to talk to these chips by mmap'ing them through
this driver. For some hardware configs like on the Blade 100 a fix
for the Xorg sparc64 MD bus code is however needed (added in version
6.8.2_2 of the xorg-server port).
The video driver font loading and saving methods are not implemented,
yet, as syscons(4) needs more work in that area to work viable on
sparc64.
With minor modifications machfb(4) would most likely also work on
powerpc, when #ifdef'ing the OFW and possibly implementing mode
setting probably also on the other archs. The latter is however
not very practible at the moment as it would conflict with vga(4).
Tested/developed with: Rage II+ add-on card on AX1105 and AXi board,
AXe board (on-board Rage Pro)
Additional testing by: marcel (Ultra 5 w/ on-board Rage Pro),
scottl (Naturetech GENIALstation 777S w/ on-board
Rage Mobility M1),
Michiel Boland and Ilmar S. Habibulin (Blade 100
w/ on-board Rage XL)
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