Best XF86 version?

[Kelledin]

On Monday 08 March 2004 03:45 pm, Allen Ziegenfus wrote:
> > What is list experience with recent versions of XF86?  Are
> > there versions to avoid?  Is my 4.3 version gonna blow up?
> > Are there better Xservers for the XP/PWS series machines?
>
> I use 4.3.0 on my PC164LX with a Matrox Millenium card. I
> have one main problem in that the x server won't return back
> to text mode after trying to exit. I think someone said this
> problem is fixed in 4.4.0. Other than that everything is fine.

Myself I use 4.3.0 on my PC164LX with a Radeon 7500 of unknown 
brand (maybe original ATI, maybe not).  The XFree86 ATI driver 
lacks a few of the acceleration features I'm used to (OpenGL 
hardware T&L isn't supported yet, and AA fonts seem to slow 
things down a lot).  It also has a problem with horizontal 
tearing when the framebuffer gets really active--in my vidcard 
experience this is generally due to framebuffer writes stomping 
on vsync.  I saw a patch addressing this issue ("video bandwidth 
calculation") go into XFree86-CVS several months ago, and I 
expect it's in 4.4.0.

Before I had the Radeon, I had an S3 Trio64 piece of garbage (a 
lot of white-box Alpha systems have these).  Presumably Tru64 
works well on S3 cards, but XFree86 4.x support for these cards 
sucks miserably.  In my case it had a lot of "snow" on the 
display and frequently locked up the system.  Replacing it with 
the Radeon fixed all that.

So really, it comes down to which card you get more than which 
XFree86 you use.  I tend to recommend either ATI (Radeon 7500 
seems the least risky) or Matrox cards.  3Dfx Voodoo3/4/5 also 
work well.

-- 
Kelledin
"If a server crashes in a server farm and no one pings it, does 
it still cost four figures to fix?"