Yesterday I finally got around to adding a second head and setting up Xinerama on my dual Creator3D Sun Ultra 60 running NetBSD/sparc64 -current (4.99.4). Setup was fairly straighforward – I started with a fresh XF86Config generated by X -configure and added the necessary stanzas for the second video card and monitor.

The only slight problem I had was a missing fb1 node in /dev, with the result that XFree86 didn’t even find the second card. After much hair-pulling, I realised what the problem was and ran MAKEDEV std_sparc64 in /dev to fix it. The reason for the missing device node was that my machine had been upgraded from 3.1 to -current and I had neglected to update /dev during the upgrade. Oh well, all’s well that ends well ;-)

Dual Creator3Ds are only supported by 4.0 and later – if you try and boot 3.1 and earlier on a machine with a pair of them, you may find your console “disappearing” when the second card is initalised. To get around that, remove the second card, upgrade and then reinstall the card.

Some useful resources:

Update: fixed the broken link to my XF86Config

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