This week at POWER.org's Power Architecture Dev Con '07 IBM showed a system that is known internally as Bimini. At the conference it was shown with X running doing a continuous loop of kernel compiles. It's a 4-way PowerPC 970MP (2 CPUs, 2 cores per CPU) system targeted at developers. It has a PCI-Express x16 slot, and that slot ships filled with an XP10 card.

All of this XGI XP10 work that I have been doing over the last few months has been for this system. I put in some long hours last week trying to get the driver into shape for this demo, and I'm pretty pleased with the result. There is, however, still quite a bit of work to be done. The existing driver does most things (mode setting, DDC, DPMS, etc.) using BIOS calls. Obviously, that doesn't work on PowerPC! In my local tree I have single-head CRT mode setting working without the BIOS, but there's a lot of ugliness there...it also doesn't save / restore the console mode.

If you've looked through the published docs for XP10 at all, you've probably noticed that there is a lot of information about mode setting missing. I'm (painfully) aware of that, and I'm working with XGI to get that resolved.