[OpenIndiana-discuss] GPU driver issues in OpenIndiana 151a and a noisy GPU fan

[Robin Axelsson]

On 2012-02-04 17:32, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> On 02/ 4/12 05:03 AM, Nikola M. wrote:
>> On 02/ 1/12 05:51 PM, Robin Axelsson wrote:
>>> I'm using an ATI Radeon Juniper card (HD5770) and I reported a 
>>> little over a
>>> year ago that the screen went black as Xorg starts when using the 
>>> radeon
>>> driver on OI 148. The solution was to ditch the radeon driver and 
>>> use the VESA
>>> driver in its stead.
>> Best thing one can do with AMD graphics on Solaris/Illumos and 
>> Openindiana is to
>> get rid of it,
>> and get Nvidia graphics card that actually have proprietary binary 
>> drivers for
>> Solaris/Opensolaris based OS'es.
>
> For Solaris, I fully agree that the nvidia driver is the way to go for 
> performance, features, & stability.   For illumos-based distros, I cannot
> guarantee that nvidia's driver will always continue to work, as it does
> depend on some private interfaces of the Solaris kernel, and if those
> evolve and illumos version of gfx-private does not, it may not always
> work.   (It probably will as long as older Solaris 10 releases are 
> supported,
> but that's not going to be forever, though it's more likely any card you
> buy today will move to a nvidia legacy driver before the main branch 
> drops
> Solaris 10 support.)
>
>> Maybe best thing would be to bring more people to KMS Illumos 
>> implementation and porting radeon and other drivers.
>
> That's really the only viable way for illumos & openindiana to get and
> continue graphics driver support now.
>

That sounds pretty bleak to me. It's as if one is not supposed to use a 
graphics card when running OpenIndiana.

In all honesty, as for features I'm happy even if I get a crappy picture 
on the card, when I boot into OI I barely use the GPU anyway. But I 
would really like to mufflle that fan as the noise from it really is 
polluting the (indoor) environment.

I've never heard of 'KMS Illumos' before, what is KMS anyway and what 
does it stand for? It would be great if someone could clue me in.

If someone could give me pointers on how to compile individual drivers 
from source (particularly where to (w)get that source without getting 
the entire distro) on OpenIndiana and install them I could try to hack 
something up. My time and experience is rather limited but I could give 
it a try. I guess I could try to get a hold of the Solaris Internals book.