[micrex22]

Thought I'd write a quick thread about the GXT135P adapter sold for various PowerPC/POWER systems as the cards come up occasionally and they are by no means bad but just a little lacklustre (It falls under the FRUs 00P5758 and 80P4527). It's actually a Matrox G450 with the Open Firmware BIOS instead of the x86 one. The G450 manual makes a quick note about this as they were knowingly supporting machines with alternative firmware:

G450-based PCI graphics cards are recommended for computers with Intel chipsets. With non-Intel chipsets, features and performance may be limited. Specifically, the bus mastering feature may not be supported and, as a result, the DualHead DVDMax feature may not be supported and OpenGL acceleration may not be available.

So the reason why Matrox put that cautionary in is because it's up to the OS vendor to implement those features, and in the case of AIX the driver wasn't really fully polished up. Unlike the GXT6500P and GXT4500P, the GXT135P can run on any OS more or less and Linux does support it; I haven't checked what the POWER Linux support is on it these days, but I'm going to say the open source stuff most likely has OpenGL.

Now there was a company called Xi Graphics (XiG) who was creating closed-source X server re-implementations dubbed "Accelerated-X" (I can't speak to how popular they were because I only came to learn of who they were WHEN looking for information on AIX GPUs; but with all of the diatribe about open source X.org being bad and their implementations being nine-thousand times better, they sure didn't uphold on that and their company's assets are just a dead flapping fish talking about forgotten aspects of X.org and Xfree86 which probably deserves its own unique thread). They had a client in Germany who wanted to use their AIX systems with the existing Matrox graphics cards which had two outputs -- but AIX limited the G450 to only one output at a time. XiG ended up creating a 3rd party driver that allowed both video ports to be used, spanning capabilities within X11 and unlocked the ability to use OpenGL on the cards. They had a lot of different Accelerated-X mainly for Linux and Solaris, but the one developed for AIX was specifically called: Accelerated-X™ Summit Series Wall Display (HX) Series.

Of course the XiG public website eventually pulled down the AIX URLs (specifically the AIX ones and not the Linux or Solaris ones) and scrubbed it from the FTP which is no longer up anyways. And they are adamant about not selling anything to new clients except existing ones. But even if I could contact them to buy their AIX driver, these are the following questions we're faced with:

1. Would it really be worth it for $1289 USD? I could probably set a bounty for that instead lol
   
2. Does this no-longer-developed-now-of-spec-X driver even run on anything past AIX 6.1?
   
3. What's the point of trying to run the Matrox cards from a 3rd party when they've already gave up on their own solution when IBM still supports their cards (which are insanely widely available on the second-hand market) on AIX 7.1?
   

At the end of the day it would have been nice to have the XiG driver to see what could be done with the Matrox G450 on AIX but at this point it'd be easier just to cobble something from open source code and forget about the Accelerated-X nonsense. I'd be easier on XiG if they actually stuck to their word and actually sold something of substance than just complain and trash X.org when they're not even around anymore and X.org is.

Now in regards to the NATIVE support that AIX has on the GXT135P aka G450 -- well it's pretty much that. No OpenGL support, you can only use one of the video outputs at a time and performance is weak. It's the worst card you could use on AIX, but it wouldn't be a 'bad' card under POWER Linux. I personally feel that just using multiple GXT4500Ps is the way to go for AIX graphical acceleration until someone writes a better driver with a newer card. If you want to use a POWER/PowerPC machine with Linux it's an OK card -- that's pretty much the verdict.

[vishnu]

I had no idea XiG was still (admittedly marginally) in business. When they originally tanked they took their website down, without a word to the NEdit developers who were taken completely by surprise (XiG was hosting nedit.org at the time). The NEdit developers never rehosted their site and have been just been using Sourceforge since. Someone (in the Netherlands I think) grabbed the URL when it expired, but whoever that is hasn't put any new content there for almost 5 years. I furthermore think it's rather hilarious that the XFree86 website is still up. Talk about putting a bullet in the brain of your own project, smooth move Mr. Dawes.

[micrex22]

I had no idea XiG was still (admittedly marginally) in business. When they originally tanked they took their website down, without a word to the NEdit developers who were taken completely by surprise (XiG was hosting nedit.org at the time). The NEdit developers never rehosted their site and have been just been using Sourceforge since. Someone (in the Netherlands I think) grabbed the URL when it expired, but whoever that is hasn't put any new content there for almost 5 years. I furthermore think it's rather hilarious that the XFree86 website is still up. Talk about putting a bullet in the brain of your own project, smooth move Mr. Dawes.

Well thanks for the history lesson I had no idea (I'm surprised I never paid close attention to NEdit as it's something I was wanting for awhile). Although I'm starting to wonder why there are so many damn controversies and weird stories with UNIX software.

Do you know why their CTO (was that Mr. Dawes? The engineer listed on the documents is always William E. Davis) was reported on committing suicide? The specific mention is here: https://sites.google.com/site/rhdisk0/unix/aix/aixhw

I was so taken aback upon reading that, I was just looking for information on AIX graphics card -- but what I got was a drama instead. I'll quote it here for posterity in case they ever pull it:

NOTE: The aforementioned cooperative effort was halted due to the bizzare episode of events beginning in April 2011 that involved the near suicide of out CTO, attempted extortion, litigation instituted by Xi Graphics, and so on, and the suspension of graphics SW development activities. Development will be resumed pending acquisition of sufficient capital to resume (and expand) operations.

I wonder if the suicide, extortion and litigation caused them to pull that driver specifically from their site -- and then when they restored their webpages it was left in a removed state -- and they didn't care because they're just milking the residual licensing on who knows what old UNIX systems.

[jan-jaap]

Ah, Accelerated-X.

Many years ago, this is before Linux switched to ELF/glibc, I downloaded a demo of Accelerated-X from their website and found a license key included. I reported it to them, and they rewarded me with a free copy.

[vishnu]

Ah, Accelerated-X.

Many years ago, this is before Linux switched to ELF/glibc, I downloaded a demo of Accelerated-X from their website and found a license key included. I reported it to them, and they rewarded me with a free copy.

Ah, but the important question is, did their accelerated X server actually do anything? I don't think it ever had hardware rendered OpenGL, for example. Always wondered why they could call their server "accelerated" if it left OpenGL rendering in the CPU.

I remember the switch from a.out to ELF, it happened between Slackware versions 7 and 8. I had just purchased the Linux version of BX Pro from ICS, and it required ELF, so I was downloading and installing all the Slackware 8 pre-releases and installing them, it was a tedious process, but I know hundreds of Slackware devotees who install every new Slackware package as Patrick releases them. I like Slackware but I'm not *that* into it. I'm still running the Slackware 14.2+ pre-release from 13 months ago, it works great...

[micrex22]

Ah, but the important question is, did their accelerated X server actually do anything? I don't think it ever had hardware rendered OpenGL, for example. Always wondered why they could call their server "accelerated" if it left OpenGL rendering in the CPU.

I remember the switch from a.out to ELF, it happened between Slackware versions 7 and 8. I had just purchased the Linux version of BX Pro from ICS, and it required ELF, so I was downloading and installing all the Slackware 8 pre-releases and installing them, it was a tedious process, but I know hundreds of Slackware devotees who install every new Slackware package as Patrick releases them. I like Slackware but I'm not *that* into it. I'm still running the Slackware 14.2+ pre-release from 13 months ago, it works great...

Ah.... that's baloney, I thought the OpenGL acceleration on their drivers for AIX were actually leveraging the Matrox G450 chip and not just quickly done through software. if you refer to this PDF here William Davis even claims as such: https://www.xig.com/Pages/Edu/Case-135P.pdf

I quote:

The XiG implementation of X was designed to insure that the software would be robust (an oft abused term), fast (by taking full advantage of the hardware features of the chips/cards), flexible enough to easily add support for new graphical features in the X server as well as the chips/cards, easily portable to various computer platforms and OS kernels, easily maintained (since XiG does not charge for routine maintenance), and extensible to accommodate OpenGL, and other extensions to the X specifications as they were added.  That's how XiG does it.  And the results shown in Figure 1 are proof that the XiG approach works.

But considering that they released the serial key with the demo version and have had all of these problems, and they built the driver in 90 days I'm kind of skeptical.

And then William Davis goes on to talk about the 'POO X' and I started laughing. Can anyone take a name like the POO seriously?

[vishnu]

My mistake; I was recalling their HX series wall display server, which didn't have OpenGL hardware acceleration...

[hamei]

I remember the G450 as being a cutrate, worse version of the G400 ... iirc the Scitech Display Doc (pretty neat graphics driver system) ran the 400 by defining it as a 450 ... OS/2 was never big on OpenGL 

The 400 was pretty nice for its day .... not fast at 3d but the best around for 2d.