I have an old computer (2007) with a SiS Xabre (330). it works perfectly (despite its slowness) on Windows XP/Vista. however, on linux, it is impossible to run either the xf86-video-sis or the xf86-video-sisusb driver. it works correctly with fbdev and vesa, but the lack of 2d acceleration is very frustrating, to the point where a 480p video on vlc freezes.

also, will installing one of these drivers allow to use opengl without llvmpipe?

here is the relevant error for sisusb: and for sis: I am currently on openSUSE Tumbleweed, I have tried fedora and Arch Linux. If I have to change distro it's no problem (even going back to the ones already tried). .

Hello, Gitez & Welcome to LQ.

SiS? Oh dear, Oh dear, what awful stuff to be stuck with. Please post your full output of lspci & lsusb. Back then, the chipset consisted of

1. A Northbridge: Typically with a Front Side Bus of 667Mhz (or faster) which fed ram and Southbridge and also housed the IGP, if there was one.
2. A Southbridge: That fed disks, usb hubs, pci, sound (often integrated), network cards and any other integrated 'slow' stuff.

Where the AGP bus was fed from I honestly forget. Anyhow according to this thread there is no linux driver for that card - period.

Either way, I'd recommend getting off SuSE and getting on one of: Arch; Gentoo; Slackware (My personal favourite). You can compile and do stuff with those without asking any installer's permission.

Around about 2000, a bunch of cheap Via & SiS stuff appeared on cheap motherboards, and got well enough known to be held in utter contempt. Both companies/brands struggled on for a few years before they were bought out.

As for your errors, The only references to 'sisusb' in my kernel modules are in the usb section. I personally think it shouldn't be trying to drive video with a usb driver.

The "undefined symbol" errors mean that you have some required library, but the version isn't new enough. A trawl through Xorg.).log will give you the gory details of the kernel and X trying to negotiate with the video card.

As a fallback, set up the framebuffer and vesa modules and one of them might give you 2D using the swrast driver in Mesa. That will have you squeezing the last out of whatever sucky cpu is in there. But you're hardly doing this for the ultimate in performance. I see this as a Museum curator's job

business_kid nailed it. Just about any old Radeon or NVidia PCI card for more than $10 on eBay should on Linux run circles around anything SiS ever upchucked. If there's an available PCIeX16 slot, so much the better for a $20 or more gfxcard.

A little bit more information about hardware (CPU model, mainboard model, output of lspci -v) and software (32-Bit or 64-Bit Linux) may be helpful.

The SiS Xabre 330 GPU lacks vertex shaders.

If you want to replace this graphics card with another AGP graphics card consider following:
If more than 2,5 GiB RAM is installed in your computer and "memory remapping" isn't enabled in BIOS or BIOS doesn't support it, any Ati AGP graphics card won't work because address range of these cards starts at 2,75 GiB.
nvidia AGP graphics cards works in computers with 3 GiB RAM installed and a BIOS that doesn't support "memory remapping". "AGP aperture size" should be limited to 128M. "AGP fast writes" must be disabled in BIOS to use nouveau. nouveau kernel driver gives poor performance in comparison to radeon kernel driver. Proprietory nvidia drivers for AGP graphics cards are limited to old kernel versions.

Just thinking, back in the day, I bought my kids one of those awful SiS chipset motherboards. IDE ran at 2-3MB/S, until I made my own kernel for the thing, critically excluding the 'generic pci' driver, and compiling in the driver for the SiS5513.

Video was the SiS 6326, an earlier model than yours. There were then 16 modes that every card was relied upon to have to install software, but the SiS6326 didn't have them so linux installs were text only. But there was an X driver for that. You might look for that, and it might do something for your video.

It will hardly be well maintained. You may have to grab the latest source code and 'bend it straight' with regards to kernel headers, etc. But if you get something together, it may do something for you.

You have a few ideas now. Report back on progress.

Need a older xorg and possibly a older kernel for the sis graphics drivers to work.

Ran into the same problem with savage graphics chip.

Phonorix was where I cruised to get info on mine. Might help. Might not. Either way. Good Luck.


https://cateee.net/lkddb/web-lkddb/FB_SIS_315.html

The OP has answers here, but he's gone very quiet...

ping @OP??

Sorry for my absence, I did not see that there were several answers. The motherboard of the pc is an intel D201GLY2 https://ark.intel.com/content/www/fr...-d201gly2.html

With the motherboard is included an Intel Celeron 220 64bit (far from being the fastest...) https://ark.intel.com/content/www/fr...3-mhz-fsb.html

I found this driver, which compiles correctly: https://github.com/gununu/xf86-video-sis-stable.git
the problem is that it requires sisfb which doesn't seem to be integrated in the kernel anymore (I also tried the LTS version)

so I try sis-dri, it's compiling as I write
I'll keep you posted

Hope it works. These things were primitive, but the 'sis-dri' will probably be faster than the sis-fb, which has no aceleration.

I forget what I used for my SiS 6326, but it was the only driver for it.

sis-dri is installed. but I don't know how to enable it.
it is installed in /usr/lib/xorg/modules/dri/, but the /dev/dri folder doesn't exist, so I guess it is either not loaded or not compatible.

also, should i use vesa or fbdev?

I would try both to see resolution choices on xrandr or arandr.

I mean, to use sis-dri. I can't get it to work.
as it is, vesa gives me much more performance

For those trying to help you, that sort of answer is extremely frustrating. WHY won't it work? Post the errors or if it compiled correctly, the symptoms.

as I said, sis-dri is installed, I'm sure of it since the file /usr/lib/xorg/modules/dri/sis_dri.so exists. I have no idea how to activate it, in the Xorg logs there is nothing besides the fact that vesa tries to open a device: I guess I have to activate it or something.

there is also another error: but nothing relevant because I had to uninstall the sis driver to install sis-dri (they conflict)

freedesktop refers to a DRI driver incompatible with the SIS 330: https://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/SiS/, however I don't know if they mention the same driver.
In short I'm starting to lose hope, I thought that maybe in the meantime there had been more or less functional drivers, but as vesa with llvmpipe gives me correct results, I'll be satisfied.

In openSUSE Leap, xf86-video-sis provides /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/sis_drv.so, and neither /usr/lib/xorg/modules/dri/ nor /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/dri/ exist. I looked for a /lib/modules/<version>/kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/ for sis*.ko and didn't find any. Your 'Failed to load module "sis"' is due to missing sis_drv.so.