Radeon Now Work Well On PC-BSD, But USB Mouse Support Is Iffy

Written by Michael Larabel in BSD on 13 February 2014 at 01:44 PM EST. 1 Comment
BSD
Since last month's release of FreeBSD 10.0 and PC-BSD 10.0 that followed, many Phoronix readers have been asking about benchmarks of this major BSD operating system update that's home to many new features. Here's an update on my FreeBSD/PC-BSD 10.0 testing thus far.

Long story short, the testing is still happening but alas is going slowly due to being limited to all the tests and articles that happen everyday at Phoronix. On a few systems now I have run into difficulties too with hardware regressions that have dragged out the testing process. In case you missed it, last month I wrote about my 10 minute experience with FreeBSD 10 and one of the issues still encountered is USB mouse support not working...

On three systems now with PC-BSD 10.0 I have had USB mice / trackpads not working even on a system that was happily running FreeBSD/PC-BSD 9.x in the past and where USB keyboard support is working fine. I've tried disabling/enabling legacy USB and USB 3.0 to no avail and tried multiple mice, but I seem to have bad luck with getting USB mice to work on this updated operating system in 2014. This is using the PC-BSD 10.0-RELEASE image and in searching about mouse problems on FreeBSD/PC-BSD 10.0 with Google, it seems several others have encountered such issues but they seemed to be running earlier development versions of 10.0. With having much PC hardware on hand and in saving time, it's been quicker just switching to other systems to find working USB mouse support. (It's also a pity that PC-BSD 10.0 doesn't seem to support KDE's keyboard shortcuts "out of the box", but fortunately the more keyboard-friendly Fluxbox is also installed.)

To end this brief testing status update on a positive note, I have been pleased with the open-source AMD Radeon driver support found in FreeBSD 10.0. This is the first release that has the Radeon DRM/KMS driver ported from the Linux kernel and overall it's been working fine for the older R600 and R700 series graphics processors I have tested thus far. The 3D user-space driver is Mesa 9.1 but there is ongoing work to deliver Mesa 10.0. For those curious about the graphics driver support in FreeBSD 10.0, check out the FreeBSD.org Graphics Wiki page that is very thorough with its information and compatibility notes.

Stay tuned for hopefully the first of the PC-BSD/FreeBSD 10.0 performance benchmarks in the next week.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

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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