This driver is under active development. While many are using it with success in fairly rigorous environments, it should be considered beta quality. Adjust your expectations accordingly.
The current maintainer is Mark Sutton mark.sutton@laitram.com.
Contact information is as follows:
22 January 1999 Release of 1.5.3:
Copyright (C) 1998, 1999 Mark Sutton
Copyright (C) 1998 Ian Reid
The original Linux port was done by Jim Bray:
Copyright (C) 1996 Jim Bray (http://as220.org/jb).
As noted below the original FreeBSD version of the driver
was written and copyrighted by Jim Lowe and Mark Tinguely.
This is a port and partial rewrite of the FreeBSD Matrox Meteor
FrameGrabber Driver, written by Jim Lowe and Mark Tinguely. Matt
Welsh's bigphysarea mechanism is used to substitute for the BSD
vm_page_alloc_contig().
It requires at least a 1.3-series kernel, but it hasn't been tested
on such an ancient kernel in ages, you should really upgrade to something
newer then this for a number of reasons! It also works with v2.x.x series kernels. The
bigphysarea patch is not included in the v2.x.x kernel so you still need
to make the patch. See the section "Which bigphysarea patch do I use?"
below for information on which patch to use for your kernel.
Older and possibly newer versions can be found on ftp.rwii.com in
/pub/linux/system/Meteor, which is the driver's home site.
I make an attempt here to clear up the muddiness somewhat.
Point # 1:
All the above mentioned products are currently in production and, according
to Matrox, will be for several more years.
Point # 2:
The "RGB" boards have the ability to grab images from an RGB type camera.
Now comes the interesting part:
The "PPB" boards were introduced to address compatibility problems with early
Pentium PRO motherboards.
This is a hardware issue, not a driver issue. Some, and I stress SOME,
Pentium Pro, and Pentium-II mother board implementations require a PPB
board to work correctly, others REQUIRE one of the non-PPB designated
boards, e.g. a Meteor, or Meteor/RGB (without the PPB designation).
This is a HARDWARE issue. What I am about to say here holds true
for DOS, Windows/95/98/NT, as well as for Linux (and BSD, etc.)
Unfortunately, there have been exceptions reported to almost all of the
combinations outlined, but basically:
With the Triton series and a non-PPB, you're golden.
With the 440FX and the PPB, you're ok.
440EX or 440BX with non-PPB is good.
AVOID THE 440LX!!!!!
I need some reports regarding chipsets newer than 440BX.
If you have a 440LX based system that you just must use a Meteor with,
see if your distributor will sell you one of each and let you return the one
that doesn't work. (Or return both if neither do...).
Finally:
Most Matrox distributors are telling people: "Use a non-PPB with a Pentium,
and a PPB with a PPro or P-II". THIS IS BAD INFORMATION!!!!! GO BY THE TABLE
ABOVE!
This is true for Windows/95/98/NT as well as Linux!
(Rant mode off... I apologize!)
BTW: The file "http://www.matrox.com/imgweb/products/meteor/meteor.pdf"
contains a compatibility table by PC model, that tells you which Meteor
version you need for specific PC's. The good news is that it helps sort
out, to some extent, which 440LX systems use the PPB, and which use the
non-PPB. The bad news is that the list is far from all-inclusive of
all available computers! (The list jibes with the table above, to the
extent of the computer models it covers...)
Note: the newest bigphysarea patch for the 2.2.5 kernel
(which works on several other 2.2.x series kernels, see below)
does not add this selection to the "make *config" process. With this
patch, bigphysarea reservation will be turned on all the times in
a kernel patched with this patch.
The RedHat module directories are not compatible with this makefiles'
"make install" so enough lines have been commented out in this
pre-release that "make install" will probably not do anything useful.
We just put meteor.o somewhere convenient and use insmod/rmmod.
(Mark Sutton - mark.sutton@laitram.com). Fixing the makefile is probably
not very hard though, maybe in the next pre-release...
Your meteors can all use the same IRQ, and are set up for IRQ sharing
with other devices. Note that the other devices are more than likely
not, but if you can load the module, it means everything should be OK
regarding IRQ allocation/sharing.
At the above two sites, you will find a patch for kernel 2.2.5 also.
I have found this patch to work for 2.2.2 - 2.2.5 inclusive.
The above patch may work for 2.2.0 and 2.2.1 also. If not, you can try
"2.2.0-pre8.bigphys.patch" at the ftp.rwii.com site. Note that this
"pre8" patch has a bug that disables SMP functions in SMP machines,
yikes! Best to stick with the stable "2.2.5" patch and update your
kernel if you have to.
This driver uses features that absolutely require a 2.2.x series
kernel. It will not work at all on 2.0.x kernels. (It probably
works on some of the very last 2.1.x kernels.)
Features of this driver include:
Caveats regarding this driver.
This driver is exactly what Mark Wolski sent to me.
I plan to fold the improvements of this driver into the
main driver, probably in the next release. A config script
would allow the user to pick what features to enable
(E. g. himemfb vs. bigphysarea) and maintain backward compatibility.
General Historical Background
This work was supported by RWI (Real World Interface) Inc., and the AI
Lab at Brown University.
Older History:
Version 1.0: 5/1/96
Version 1.1: 5/6/96
Version 1.2: 14/May/96 Ian Reid (ian@robots.ox.ac.uk)
Version 1.3 22/May/96 Ian Reid (ian@robots.ox.ac.uk)
Version 1.4 17/July/96 ian@robots.ox.ac.uk & anuj@fwi.uva.nl
Version 1.4a 23/7/96
Version 1.4b 5/11/96
Version 1.4c 20/2/97
Which Model Of Meteor Board Do I Need For Which Processor/Chipset?
(Read This Section!!!!!! It Is Important!!)
There has been tremendous confusion in the meteor user's mailing list lately
regarding which meteor to use with which processor and/or chipset.
This Linux driver supports the Meteor, Meteor/RGB, Meteor/PPB, and
Meteor/RGB/PPB boards. IT DOES NOT CURRENTLY SUPPORT the Meteor-II.
All discussion below refers to the first four boards mentioned above,
NOT the Meteor-II.
Matrox makes four (4) variations of the original Meteor. The Meteor,
Meteor/RGB, Meteor/PPB, and Meteor/RGB/PPB.
486 PCI implementations Forget it, won't work.
"Orion" chipset. Forget it, won't work.
Pentium 430** chipsets (Triton Series) Meteor (non-PPB)
PPro/P-II 440FX Meteor/PPB
440LX Problematic,
Some require Meteor/PPB,
some require Meteor,
some work with both,
some work with neither.
(no bull)
(BTW, we have an LX
ABIT brand motherboard
that works perfectly in all
modes - yes including
YUV_PLANER - with our
non-PPB meteors, but my
mail files have been innundated
with horror stories about
this chipset and meteors.
AVOID!)
440EX Meteor (non-PPB)
440BX Meteor (non-PPB)
Non-Intel Pentium chipsets: YMMV. I have seen positive
success reports with SiS
chipsets.
Bottom Line:
Installing:
image=/vmlinuz
label=linux-big
append="bigphysarea=XXX"
root=/dev/hda2
read-only
XXX = number of 4k-pages. For example, to grab one image
640x480x32bpp use 301. If you get ENOMEMs, increase the XXX value.
alias char-major-40 meteor
If you are not using kerneld, (the neat autoloading thing), it
probably isn't necessary.
crw-r--r-- 1 root root 40, 0 Mar 14 22:19 /dev/mmetfgrab0
crw-r--r-- 1 root root 40, 0 Mar 14 22:19 /dev/meteor0
crw-r--r-- 1 root root 40, 1 Mar 14 22:19 /dev/mmetfgrab1
crw-r--r-- 1 root root 40, 1 Mar 14 22:19 /dev/meteor1
or whatever you prefer. The test programs will look for the mmetfgrab
names.
Which bigphysarea patch do I use?:
Patches for a number of 2.0.XX series stable kernels are available from:
http://www.uni-paderborn.de/fachbereich/AG/heiss/linux/bigphysarea.html.
Simply pick the one for your kernel. Most, if not all, of these patches
can also be found at ftp://rwii.com/pub/linux/system/Meteor
A few words about an alternate driver:
I have posted a highly re-written version of the driver, submitted
by Mark Wolski on the
ftp.rwii.com site as meteor-1.5.4a-alternate.tar.gz. Here is a
download link.