Mesa's DRM Library Now Has Proper FreeBSD Support Upstream

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 22 April 2020 at 06:52 AM EDT. 23 Comments
MESA
Mesa's DRM library (libdrm) that resides between the Mesa drivers and the Direct Rendering Manager kernel interfaces now has proper FreeBSD support upstream in this important library.

FreeBSD continues making good progress on porting/maintaining the Linux kernel DRM drivers on their BSD. With time their libdrm package in FreeBSD Ports has accumulated a lot of their own fixes/changes to adapt to the FreeBSD kernel. This has included work due to differences in various functions between Linux and FreeBSD, PCI handling differences, and other bits that need to be adapted for jiving with the FreeBSD kernel.

Those FreeBSD-specific patches have now been cleaned up and as of yesterday were upstreamed. Following more than a dozen commits and the merge request being open for three months, that proper FreeBSD support is now upstream to ease the maintenance burden and help in maintaining the FreeBSD support in-step.

FreeBSD has decent Intel and Radeon graphics capabilities thanks to leveraging the Linux kernel driver code while generally the best GPU support on this BSD still is with NVIDIA thanks to their official binary drivers that tend to "just work" on the OS.
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