Re: [Qemu-devel] Graphic card

[Ricardo Almeida]

On 10/30/05, Mike Swanson <address@hidden> wrote:

3. Perhaps, but there's two things here. First of all, the card would
have to be documented in a fair amount of low-level detail, something
that big video card companies rarely or never do.

What about the Via/S3 Unichrome? Via allows access to the Linux Video Interface (http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx?PageID=151) and there are open source drivers (http://sourceforge.net/projects/unichrome/) from where, to my believe, it's possible to understand the graphic card.
I'm just a java developer so I really can't help in any of the hard work. Just trying to make some suggestions to improve this great software :)

Secondly, the
complexity of the card might make its emulated implementation even
slower than the Cirrus one used currently

This is something I tend to dissagree... People aren't going to emulate a full pc in a slow one. The worst graphic card sold today (picked a random online shop here in Portugal) is a GeForce FX5200, with DirectX 9.0 and OpenGL 1.4 hardware accelaration. I'm sure most calls to the emulated graphic card can have an almost direct call.
Cirrus card can still be emulated, but I don't see nothing wrong in having an emulated card that requires a 60€ graphic card to work...

4. It sounds reasonable, but it undermines one of QEMU's goals:
running guest operating system without modification (and drivers
certainly count as one). Also, it'll possibly limit the number of
operating systems you'd run in QEMU with fancy graphics...
implementing Cirrus makes it possible to run many OSes with no (or
few) video problems, including Windows 95, Win NT 4, almost every
GNU/Linux, almost every BSD, Solaris, Darwin, Plan 9, QNX, DOS, BeOS,
etc.

What I meant in 4 was to keep the Cirrus emulated but have a Cirrus++ driver made to take advantages of knowing it's not really a Cirrus card but an emulated one... But as I said, it's probably more work done than advantages get.

On 10/29/05, Ricardo Almeida <address@hidden > wrote:
>  I'm sure you got this asked over and over again, but I joined the list
> recently :o)
>
>  I've installed qemu+kemu on linux and installed windows XP on it. The
> graphic card is slow :( and it's not possible to see videos :(
>
>  3- Why not implement some betther graphic card with 3d support like 3DFX
> Voodoo3 (I believe it was the first 3DFX that was also a graphic card and
> not just a 3d accelarator)?
>  4- Why not implement some Qemu special driver for common installed systems
> that names itself as a Cirrus driver but it's a vmware-like driver.