[H-GEN] Aid and Assistance Sought

Mike Andrew mikero at norfolk.nf
Sun Apr 2 10:29:15 EDT 2000


[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and ]
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On Sun, 02 Apr 2000, Frank Brand wrote:
> > it is not a true vga chip, but a piece of shit.
>> 
> Rather harshly and a tad inaccurately described. 

It is neither harsh, nor innacurate. Problems with sis are well recognised in
the industry, to the extent that quotations for equipment supply specifically
exclude them. The sis are not true vga cards, they do not have the standard 16
ibm modes and cannot be used as is, with Xfree vga16 server. It is for this
reason they almost inevitably are unable to be used in the general installs of
most distros. They also require on board memory support. Most, not all, but
most of the Sis chipset does not have memory of its own. They are a nightmare,
and, if you read the fine print, they are only garanteed to work at 640x480
resolution. YMMV. As far as being entry level. Certainly, nothing wrong with
that. The S3 (trio) series does a proper job for the same price.

The Sis6326 (and from memory the Sis620) are unuseable on Gigayte
motherboards, among others, as they interfere with the ide interface chips
of an otherwise well behaving system.

The series is incompatible with the BX and A4-Alux series of Intel
chipsets because they hold the bus for too long and lock the clock. There is
very little in their technical specs which any designer would consider
'standard' They abuse the resources of the motherboard in general.

The SiS520 has an 'undocomented feature' where it arbitrarlity decides it is no
longer in the memory space allocated to it, but 'somewhere else'. This has
interesting results with Linux memory management.

None of which helps the person with a 6326 glued on their laptop motherboard.
The only clean way of installing is to use a distro which has 3.3.5 where sis
is supported sufficiently that it doesn't display the infamous black screen, or
3.3.6 where it now displays the infamous striped bands instead.

-- 
http://users.nf/linux/ StepByStep submissions: mikero at norfolk.nf



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