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

[Robin Axelsson]

On 2012-02-05 00:04, Mehmet Erol Sanliturk wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 4, 2012 at 5:59 PM, Robin Axelsson<gu99roax at student.chalmers.se
>> wrote:
>> 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.
>>
>>
>>
>>
> KMS :
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_mode-setting
>
>
> Thank you very much .
>
>
> Mehmet Erol Sanliturk
> _______________________________________________
> OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list
> OpenIndiana-discuss at openindiana.org
> http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
>
> .
>
I found something in the Gentoo forums that may help:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-911060-start-0.html

I just don't know how this could be done in OpenIndiana/Solaris. Another 
way could be to do a D0-D3 powerdown on the PCIe slot with the card but 
I don't know if it is applicable on expansion cards that have/use an 
auxiliary power source. I also don't know how things such as PCI power 
Management and ACPI are done in Solaris.

I found some source code of a radeon driver but I'm not sure if it is 
the latest one. Perhaps it is the lack of 'KMS' that creates this problem.