[1541] in Release_7.7_team
Can't certify 24 Plane Ultra 5 without a test machine.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Thu Nov 12 18:48:16 1998
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 18:48:08 -0500 (EST)
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: Dennis <Dennis.Aylward@East.Sun.COM>
Cc: nschmidt@MIT.EDU, wfitz@MIT.EDU, crockett@MIT.EDU, vkumar@MIT.EDU,
rbasch@MIT.EDU, miki@MIT.EDU, ghudson@MIT.EDU, release-team@MIT.EDU,
owls@MIT.EDU
Summary:
We need a 24 plane Ultra-5 in here pronto so we can determine what is
REALLY going on.
We can't figure it out from the information we have in hand, and the
history with similar situations does NOT provide us with proper guidance.
----
Dennis:
I've conferred with my wizards of deployment, and we cannot make sense
of the information in the 24 Plane Ultra-5 description:
The on-board 24-bit PGX24 Graphics does not simultaneously support
both 8-bit and 24-bit environments (Creator Graphics, for example,
does support 8-bit and 24-bit environments simultaneously). This
may cause a problem for some older applications that require an
8-bit-only environment. For some customers who use applications
with this legacy requirement, the graphics setting for the on-board
24-bit PGX24 Graphics will have to be configured to operate in
8-bit-only mode, not 24-bit-only mode.
It SOUNDS like there are a couple serious problems here:
1. Before being able to install Athena on the new machine, we might
have to issue a patch release to carefully push the machine into 8 bit
only mode.
2. The value of 24 bit planes is completely lost to us because the
graphics system cannot support 8 bit and 24 bit visual simultaneously.
Our previous experience was this: We were going to start X in 24 plane
mode by default on SGI's but ended up NOT doing so because some
courseware choked, and we didn't have source for it. Right now, when
you log into Athena, X starts in 8 bit mode but knows how to offer
Netscape a 24 bit visual so colors don't run.
PERHAPS the Ultra-5's 24 plane graphics does this, but from the
description it sounds like not.
What SHOULD have happened was that the X server should have been so
written that when started in 8 bit mode, it would offer 8 bits as the
default visual and offer the following other visuals:
depth 1, bits_per_pixel 1, scanline_pad 32
depth 8, bits_per_pixel 8, scanline_pad 32
depth 12, bits_per_pixel 16, scanline_pad 32
depth 15, bits_per_pixel 16, scanline_pad 32
depth 24, bits_per_pixel 32, scanline_pad 32
(This is what the SGI does, and what I believe the Creator graphics
does. It is, in my ivory tower influcenced opinion, the ONLY sane way
to make a 24 plane hardware system behave.)
We need a 24 plane Ultra-5 in here pronto so we can determine what is
REALLY going on.
If the PGX-24 graphics truly does not support mixed 24 and 8 plane
modes, we will have to engage in a non-trivial survey and redo of legacy
applications before we can give our customers the value they seek.
-wdc
