DragonFlyBSD Is Almost To Linux 3.10 Era Intel Graphics Support

Written by Michael Larabel in BSD on 28 January 2015 at 08:38 AM EST. 5 Comments
BSD
While FreeBSD, DragonFlyBSD, OpenBSD, and other BSD distributions have made much headway in the past year or two in porting the Linux DRM/KMS drivers to their kernels, the work still measurably lags behind the latest upstream Linux kernel code.

The most common BSD operating systems now ship with Intel DRM/KMS support for select chipset generations and more recently have started shipping the AMD Radeon DRM/KMS driver from the Linux kernel too, while some developers have also started toying with the Nouveau driver as a next step. While the necessary infrastructure improvements have been made to each of these BSD kernels in being compatible with the modern DRM core Linux subsystem and drivers, it's still a lot of work to maintain and keep in line with the latest Linux developments.

DragonFlyBSD's Intel graphics support has been at a feature level comparable to the Linux 3.8~3.9 kernel for some time while after a lot of work they're getting close on Linux 3.10. This comes while the upstream Linux kernel is almost to Linux 3.19 and the Radeon/Intel/Nouveau drivers continue to see much improvements each kernel cycle.

DragonFlyBSDDigest pointed out the new Linux 3.10 i915 graphics code for testing in the DragonFlyBSD world. This Intel Linux code porting work has been mostly done by François Tigeot and recently for the DRM code he's implemented the Linux version of kfree(), added/improved various Linux header files, updated various DRM files from later Linux 3.9 point releases, and implemented support for various DRM functions.

With this patch the Intel DRM code is being prepared to reach a Linux 3.10 feature level by François. The changes with this shift of around 3,000 lines of code has page-flipping improvements, better robustness on GPU hangs, hotplug IRQ storm detection and mitigation, bug fixes and performance improvements from GEN4 to Haswell, improved Valley View / Bay Trail support, better overclocking support for Sandy Bridge / Ivy Bridge / Haswell with improved Turbo frequency scaling, improved display detection and mode-setting, and other changes.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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