R128(4)

💖 R128(4) — bestie's guide to the ATI Rage 128 driver 💖

okay so this is the manual page for r128, from the Kernel Interfaces Manual section (that's section 4, iykyk — drivers and kernel interfaces, no cap). grab a snack, we're going in 🍓

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✨ NAME ✨

r128 — the ATI Rage 128 video driver. that's it. that's the name. iconic. 👑

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

so this is how you actually summon it, bestie — inside your xorg.conf:

Section "Device"
  Identifier "devname"
  Driver "r128"
  ...
EndSection

the ... is doing a lot of heavy lifting there but go off 💅

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

r128 is an Xorg driver for ATI Rage 128 based video cards. and like… it's not playing games, she's fully loaded:

• full support for 8, 15, 16 and 24 bit pixel depths
• hardware acceleration of drawing primitives
• hardware cursor
• video modes up to 1800x1440 @ 70Hz
• doublescan modes (e.g., 320x200 and 320x240)
• gamma correction at all pixel depths
• a fully programming dot clock
• robust text mode restoration for VT switching

and Dualhead is supported on M3/M4 mobile chips ✨ the way she does dualhead on mobile?? obsessed.

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✨ SUPPORTED HARDWARE ✨

the r128 driver supports all ATI Rage 128 based video cards, including:

• the Rage Fury AGP 32MB
• the XPERT 128 AGP 16MB
• the XPERT 99 AGP 8MB

if it's Rage 128 based, she's got you 🫶

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✨ CONFIGURATION DETAILS ✨

pls go read xorg.conf(5) for the general configuration lore. this section is only about the stuff that's specific to this driver, k?

the driver auto-detects all device information necessary to initialize the card. but like — if auto-detection is giving you problems, you can specify:

VideoRam - in kilobytes
MemBase  - physical address of the linear framebuffer
IOBase   - physical address of the MMIO registers
ChipID   - PCI DEVICE ID

and on top of that, the following driver Options are supported:

• "SWcursor" "boolean" — selects software cursor. default is off.
• "NoAccel" "boolean" — enables or disables all hardware acceleration. default is to enable hardware acceleration.
• "EnablePageFlip" "boolean" — enable page flipping for 3D acceleration. this will increase performance but won't work correctly in some rare cases, hence the default is off. (it's giving "sounds fun, might break" 😭)
• "RenderAccel" "boolean" — enables or disables hardware Render acceleration. it's only supported when using EXA acceleration and DRI. default is to enable Render acceleration.
• "AccelMethod" "string" — chooses between available acceleration architectures. the only valid option is EXA. XAA was the traditional acceleration architecture, but support for it has been removed from the Xorg server and this driver. EXA is a newer acceleration architecture with better performance for the Render and Composite extensions. default is EXA.
• "VideoKey" "integer" — this overrides the default pixel value for the YUV video overlay key. the default value is undefined.
• "ProgramFPRegs" "boolean" — enable or disable programming of the flat panel registers. ⚠️ beware that this may damage your panel, so use this at your own risk. the default depends on the device.
• "PanelWidth" "integer"
• "PanelHeight" "integer" — override the flat panel dimensions in pixels. they are used to program the flat panel registers and are normally determined using the video card BIOS. if the wrong dimensions are used, the system may hang. 💀 so like, be careful bestie.
• "UseFBDev" "boolean" — enable or disable use of an OS-specific framebuffer device interface (which is not supported on all OSs). see fbdevhw(4) for further information. default: on for PowerPC, off for other architectures.
• "DMAForXv" "boolean" — try or don't try to use DMA for Xv image transfers. this will reduce CPU usage when playing big videos like DVDs, but may cause instabilities. default: off.
• "ShowCache" "boolean" — enable or disable viewing offscreen cache memory. a development debug option. default: off.
• "VGAAccess" "boolean" — tell the driver if it can do legacy VGA IOs to the card. this is necessary for properly resuming consoles when in VGA text mode, but shouldn't be if the console is using radeonfb or some other graphic mode driver. some platforms like PowerPC have issues with those, and they aren't necessary unless you have a real text mode in console. the default is off on PowerPC and SPARC and on on other architectures.

Dualhead Note: 🎀 the video BIOS on some laptops interacts strangely with dualhead. this can result in flickering and problems changing modes on crtc2. if you experience these problems, try toggling your laptop's video output switch (e.g., fn-f7, etc.) prior to starting X, or switch to another VT and back. (classic "have you tried turning the output off and on again" energy ngl)

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✨ SEE ALSO ✨

Xorg(1), xorg.conf(5), Xserver(1), X(7) 🦋

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✨ AUTHORS ✨

• Rickard E. (Rik) Faith — faith@precisioninsight.com
• Kevin E. Martin — kevin@precisioninsight.com

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and that's the whole page, bestie 💜 this was X Version 11, xf86-video-r128 6.13.0, dated R128(4) — go forth and configure your Rage 128, you absolute main character 🌸✨