AMD Radeon KMS Being Ported To FreeBSD

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Radeon KMS Being Ported To FreeBSD

Jean-Sébastien Pédron has started a project to implement up-to-date support for AMD GPUs in FreeBSD...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTMwNzA

[libv]

I really rather hope that this guy doesn't start with changing the formatting to match BSD style first. That's just a stupid rat-race with no ending. This is what the guy who talked about BSD/KMS in XDC toulouse started out with, we haven't heard from him in 2 years.

The only thing that makes sense is the bare minimum infrastructural changes needed to run decently under some BSD kernels, and then regularly pulling in updates with minimal pain and overhead.

Oh, if only DRM drivers were not made a whole and complete part of the linux kernel monolith... Like we had it 5 years ago... Then the different codepaths for different linux and bsd kernel versions could happily live together. It really will not be that big of a API mess, and what will be there shouldn't be too hard to abstract cleanly.

[archibald]

I had a quick look at the XDC Toulouse lineup, and I think the person to whom you are referring is Mr. Owain Ainsworth (who works on the OpenBSD project). I believe he's backported support for new Intel chips to UMS on an old Intel driver, but I think the main driving force behind KMS on OpenBSD is Matthieu Herrb.

The developer of this project is getting help from Konstantin Belousov, who successfully ported Intel KMS to the FreeBSD kernel. Given that it's a moving target and Mr. Belousov has mentioned the pain involved in tracking upstream developments, I feel confident that minimal infrastructure changes are what they are aiming for.

[dumbbell]

I really rather hope that this guy doesn't start with changing the formatting to match BSD style first. That's just a stupid rat-race with no ending.

I agree. The goal is to make changes as local and minimal as possible. However, one area where this is more difficult for instance is the locking: Linux and FreeBSD have different constraints.


--
Jean-Sébastien.

[uid313]

I hope this is ported to OpenBSD, NetBSD and DragonFly BSD too.

If he does any fixes I hope they get ported back to Linux.

[dumbbell]

I wanted to correct something in the article:

X cannot yet be started due to a problem in xf86-video-ati, but this is M. Pédron's next target.

The problem isn't in xf86-video-ati, but in our far-from-complete driver port.

--
Jean-Sébastien

[Ibidem]

As I have a Thinkpad X100e (HD3200M graphics), this is rather interesting to me in the long term.