Hello,
I'm trying to make my S3 Savage 4 card work at best of its
possibility. I've installed the new slackware 11 to try to
get dri working. The strange thing is:

> xdriinfo
Screen 0:savage
> glxinfo | grep 'direct rendering'
direct rendering: No

I have setup my card as (xorg.conf):

Section "Device"
Identifier "S3 Savage 4"
VendorName "S3"
BoardName "Savage 4"
Driver "savage"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
VideoRam 16384
EndSection

[..]

Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection

and:

> lsmod
savage
drm
agpart
viapro
i2c_savage4
[..]

with kernel 2.6.17.13 (in extra, modules installed and lilo
updated)
Moreover, scrolling in xterm is slowly than that of my slack
10.2, even if I try with a copy of the old xorg.conf file
(so, without dri), and of my last suse.
I have also tried with an ubuntu 6.10, that says
that dri is enabled with xdriinfo and glxinfo (ok),
but hangs my computer with glxgears with a warning about
the support of visual 0x42.
What could I do to get a performance like the previous
slack version and (better) get also my dri works?
Or get better diagnosis..
Thanks,
Gaetano

Look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log

Log seems to be ok.

Hmmm.. May I suggest, a good place to start might be to load Ubuntu, and copy what's in the xorg.conf file and save it somewhere, like on a floppy or something, or somewhere safe on the hard disk.
Then reload Slackware, and open up the saved file from Ubuntu and compare it to the one you have in Slackware.
This may give you a good headstart as to what is missing for the DRI.
It may NOT help you with the Visual 0x42 error, but it is a start. There may be a module or option missing or some such thing, which is preventing full performance.
After you have done this, assuming X works, examine the logs (xorg.log) and see what is there if anything, about anything missing or other error messages.

No, xorg.conf file is ok, I am (almost) sure..
These days I try with different distributions: last fedora live cd, damn small linux, foresight,
and all gives me differents output, xdriinfo and x log file gives me that dri working, but
in some distro glxinfo gives me : "direct rendering: No", even if xdriinfo gives me an output
that is not "not direct rendering capable", but "Screen 0: savage".. However, in these distros,
when I launch xdriinfo options savage it complains.. In ubuntu and fedora it lists all xml
output, glxinfo output is "direct rendering: Yes", but hangs with glxgears..
So I would like to know:

* Does anyone really can make direct rendering, 3d acceleration, tuxracer *ran* with a
S3 Savage4 card (16M video memory) ? Is this really possible ?

* Can anyone explain me all the components of x drivers (what to recompile savage.ko driver, drm
and dri drivers - if to download the binary snapshots from dri.freedesktop.org, libdrm or
whatever else) - Docs and references are really too confusing about these things - I found a
lot of posts in various forums and one says a different way to do this (wrongly).

Thanks,
Gaetano