Re: X on old (non-x86) Linux guests

[Laurent Vivier]

On 26/04/2021 16:18, Dr. David Alan Gilbert wrote:
> * Laurent Vivier (lvivier@redhat.com) wrote:
>> On 26/04/2021 12:01, Dr. David Alan Gilbert wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>   Over the weekend I got a Red Hat 6.x (not RHEL!) for Alpha booting
>>> under QEMU which was pretty neat.  But I failed to find a succesful
>>> combination to get X working; has anyone any suggestions?
>>>
>>>   That distro was from around 2000; the challenge is since we don't have
>>> VESA on non-x86, we can't change mode that way, so generic XF86_SVGA
>>> doesn't want to play with any of the devices.
>>>
>>>   I also tried the ati device, but the accelerated mach64 driver
>>> didn't recognise that ID.
>>>
>>>   Has anyone found any combo that works?
>>> I suspect using one of the existing devices, lying about PCI ID, and
>>> then turning off all accelerations might have a chance but I've not got
>>> that far.
>>>
>>> [Alpha took a bit of a fight; none of the SCSI controllers were
>>> happy, but the CMD646 worked well enough to install off a CD image
>>> from a -kernel passed in ]
>>>
>>
>> Did you try to use kernel framebuffer with X fbdev driver?
> 
> I hadn't, but how do I get it into fb mode - vga=ask doesn't work, so
> again I don't think I can get into graphics.

In kernel 2.2, it seems to be "video=[FB]", perhaps video=atyfb ?

thanks,
Laurent