[OpenIndiana-discuss] Matrox

[Alan Coopersmith]

On 12/13/11 02:07, Gabriele Bulfon wrote:
> Hi,
> my supermicro has Matrox card, but the system shows a vgatext driver and desktop enhancements
> are not working (white screen).
> How can I activate the Matrox driver?

First you have to write it or port it.

The "Desktop enhancements" (compiz) require hardware accelerated 3D support,
which on Solaris x86 platforms is basically Nvidia or recent Intel chipsets,
as no other 3D drivers have been ported.   To be honest, I'm not even sure
Matrox hardware has the minimum level of 3D support - compiz requires more
modern graphics, like Nvidia GeForce 4 series (2002 or later), while Matrox
has not been competitive in the 3D space for a very long time.

As for "vgatext" - that's the kernel driver that uses vga mode to display
the kernel text console.   You'll see that on all x86 graphics devices that
don't have a specific kernel driver - again, everything but Intel & Nvidia.
That's unrelated to which user space driver module Xorg is loading - look in
/var/log/Xorg.0.log for that.   You should see there that the "mga" Xorg
driver is provided, but that gets you 2D support, such as multiple outputs
on the card and setting graphics modes other than the VESA standard ones,
it doesn't provide 3D acceleration.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-        alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
	 Oracle Solaris Platform Engineering: X Window System