Well, currently we lack a bunch of information for the Sun video
cards. Most of the information comes from looking at the Sun X server
distributed in X11R6, but these ones do not support the high end video
cards from sun. Notably, we are sub using the cg14 and there is no
support for the Leo cards.
I have asked many times for information on those video cards at Sun
Mexico without much success, they never phone me back with the
information, I'm told that this is the same case on the US, you can't
get any infomration on the cg14, nor the Leo nor the SX nor a couple
of the other cool toys.
Currently Linux/SPARC can drive an accelerated 32 bit video card as a
dumb 8 bit frame buffer because of lack of information, so we don't
get any accelerated pixel out of it and not a single extra color from
256.
One of those video cards has some kind of MMU chip for the video card,
another one has a cpu inside and you have to download code to it
before you can take advantage of it.
I would love to run the gimp on 32 bit mode on my Linux/Sparc instead
of the crappy 8 bit I'm using now, while the guys next to me running
Solaris are happily running the gimp on 24 bit mode.
Having a good relationship with Sun shouldn't hurt us at all.
Best wishes,
Miguel.