Fantastic.

-----Original Message----- From: mark.langsdorf@amd.com [mailto:mark.langsdorf@amd.com] Sent: Tuesday, 20 January 2004 9:58 AM To: suse-amd64@suse.com Cc: discuss@x86-64.org Subject: [suse-amd64] Solving the Tyan 2885 AGP performance issues

The 2P Opteron based Tyan 2885 K8W has some problems with AGP/openGL graphics performance when using nVidia graphics cards under Linux. AMD, Tyan, and nVidia have been working together to develop fixes for the problems. Four problems have been resolved for the Tyan 2885 design.

The first issue was the inabilty of the Linux kernel to find the AMD-8151 AGP Tunnel. The AMD-8151 AGP controller is not at the normal PCI address, and the Linux kernel had to be modified to account for the change. SUSE Linux kernels starting with k_smp-2.4.21-139 include the change. The two attached patches (tyan_agp.generic.patch and tyan_agp.RHEL3.patch) fix the problem for most kernels and for the Red Hat 2.4.21-4EL kernels, respectively.

The second issue was a misallocation of MTRRs in the Tyan BIOS that prevented the nVidia driver from correctly caching the AGP aperture. Tyan fixed this with the 2885101i.ROM (1.01i) BIOS, available at ftp://ftp.tyan.com/bios_beta/2885101i.zip.

The third issue involved the nVidia 10-4499 graphics driver. nVidia has corrected the problems exposed by the updated AGP and BIOS code and released the 10-5332 driver to their website on January 20th.

The final issue involved the Linux kernel MTRR code. A patch that fixes the problem is attached to this message (mtrr.patch). It has not been included in any production kernels at this time.

These four updates, taken together, allow the 2885 to provide excellent 3D performance under Linux.

AMD would like to thank all those who contributed to defining, debugging, and verifying this problem.

Mark Langsdorf Team Lead, Linux Device Drivers Advanced Micro Devices mark.langsdorf@amd.com