Archive for August, 2020

Setting Sun SPARC video mode in OpenFirmware

Wednesday, August 19th, 2020

Some, older video drivers specific to proprietary Sun video boards such most of their early once but also one of the last of it’s kinds Creator / Elite 3d do not have a mode-setting open source Linux driver. To set another video mode for those you “currently” need to do so from the OBP / OpenFirmware, such as:

setenv output-device screen:r1600×1000x66

Unfortunately usually the cards open firmware glue does not support any arbitrary mode with this so you need to check against a list of officially Sun supported modes, … :-/ However, you can at least test what you set with

install-console

though ;-)

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OpenLDI graphic cards

Thursday, August 13th, 2020

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far away the first digital flat panel (DFP) displays where digitally connected not by DVI, butOpen LDI: a high-bandwidth digital-video interface standard for connecting graphics/video processors to flat panel LCD monitors. It was based on the FPD-Link specification, which was the standard for transferring graphics and video data through notebook hinges since the late 1990s. Both OpenLDI and FPD-Link use low-voltage differential signaling (LVDS) as the physical layer. The SGI 1600SW was the only monitor produced in significant quantities with an OpenLDI connection (though it had minor differences from the final published standards):

While there where not many display, there were a couple of non-Sgi PC graphic cards that included OpenLDI: