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

[Gerd Hoffmann]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2021 at 11:01:26AM +0100, 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.

Well, one trick is to run the vgabios in x86emu.  This is what the xorg
vesa driver still does today on non-x86 archs (which includes x86_64).

I suspect Red Has 6.x is to old for that one though.  When was it
released exactly?  I would guess late 90-ies ...

If the vesa path fails the best bet would probably be a driver for the
cirrus.  There is a cirrusfb driver in the kernel which could be
combined with the fbdev xserver, not sure when cirrusfb was merged
and whenever redhat enabled the driver though.

Also not sure whenever there is an working xfree86 cirrus driver.

> I also tried the ati device, but the accelerated mach64 driver
> didn't recognise that ID.

The virtual ati cards are probably too new.

HTH,
  Gerd