Linux/Alpha supports both DEC's TGA and generic VGA cards. The new PowerStorm cards from DEC are not supported yet.
TGA is DEC's (first) family of workstation graphics cards for the PCI bus. It makes for nice and very quick cards. The only drawback is that since it is coming from the workstation market, it does not support 16-bit color mode.
There are three versions of the TGA card. They are all based on the 21030 chip:
Model: Description:
ZLXp-E1 8-plane TGA (256 colors)
ZLXp-E2 24-plane TGA (16 million colors)
ZLXp-E3 24-plane TGA + 32-plane Zbuffer (16 million colors and 3D support)
Linux boots in VGA mode, so pretty much any graphics card should do for Linux. However, the graphics card also needs to work with the firmware. This is non-trivial since many PCI cards need proprietary wakeup sequences to bring them into a VGA compatible mode. To solve this problem, all the firmware includes an x86 emulator that is used to execute the BIOS initialization code on the graphics card. In theory, it is therefore possible plug in any PC graphics card.
DEC implemented an x86 emulator that is used by the MILO (Linux), SRM (DEC Unix), and ARC (Windows NT) firmware. This emulator is mature and can indeed initialize most, if not all, cards. To be on the safe side, take a look at the hardware-compatibility lists for DEC Unix and Windows NT before deciding on a card.
MILO also comes with an (optional) emulator that is free. It is not nearly as mature as DEC's emulator, but it nevertheless is able to initialize at least following graphics cards:
bus card type: chip: BIOS version: Note:
=== =========================== ====== =========================== =====
ISA Orchid Fahrenheit 1280 S3 805 ???? 4
ISA #9 GXE Level 12 S3 928 BIOS Version 1.13.03S
PCI #9 GXE 64 PCI S3 864 BIOS Version 1.02.09u
PCI Diamond Stealth 64 DRAM PCI S3 864 BIOS Version 1.14 1
PCI Diamond Video 64 DRAM PCI S3 868 BIOS Version 1.02 1
PCI Diamond Stealth 64 DRAM S3 764 BIOS Version 2.01 2,3
Notes:
======
1: Reported by pgwduane@mail.atnet.net.
2: The S3 764 chip is mostly known as Trio64.
3: Reported by viper@ludd.luth.se.
4: Reported by jestabro@amt.tay1.dec.com.
There currently are X servers for S3, Mach64, and TGA based cards. The S3 server is known to work with 764x, 805, 864, 928 based cards (e.g., Orchid Fahrenheit 1280, #9 GXE64, #9 Level 12). The Mach64 server is known to work with WinTurbo GX-VRAM and Graphics Xpression CX-DRAM cards. The TGA X server is currently limited to the 8-plane version (ZLXp-E1). That is, the 24-plane versions do not currently work with X (the text console should work fine, though).
The firmware can be controlled over a serial line terminal at 9600 Baud and it is possible to boot Linux/Alpha in that manner, but Linux itself does not currently support headless boots. There are kernel patches floating on the net that add this functionality, however.
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