Rants & Ramblings

Some Kind Soul(tm) sent me a Sun XVR-1000 board, complete with daughter card for additional outputs. This thing occupies two slots ( one UPA and whatever is next to it - the specs claim it needs one UPA and one PCI slot which is nonsense, it only needs additional space, not connectivity ) and has four outputs - traditional 13W3, S-Video, VGA and DVI. The latter two are on a daughter card with one additional DAC so they're likely not independent ( that, and the big, fat heatsink with attached wind tunnel accounts for the need for a 2nd slot )
Documentation for this card is not available but supporting it as a dumb framebuffer was trivial - the firmware tells you where the card's memory regions are, what video mode it's in so getting it going required just minimal poking around. For a dumb framebuffer the thing is quite fast though - in my U60 it beats some PCI graphics boards with acceleration, I guess that's where the UPA connection pays off.
So, now we support it as both console ( gfb at mainbus ) and in X ( with the wsfb driver ) - both unaccelerated for now but usable.
This hardly does the card any justice, but without documentation there's not much I can do. I found the website of one of the engineers involved with its design, tried to contact him but didn't get an answer so far. Since he also worked on other Sun graphics hardware I'm sure I won't run out of questions for a while if he ever answers.