Mesa's DRM Library Now Has Proper FreeBSD Support Upstream

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa's DRM Library Now Has Proper FreeBSD Support Upstream

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...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-Libdrm-FreeBSD-Support

[h**2]

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.

The latter is unfortunately no longer true as the proprietary NVIDIA drivers neither provide Vulkan, NVENC nor CUDA support on FreeBSD. As such the Intel and Radeon drivers seem to be overtaking NVIDIA with regard to features now.

[Guest]

Nice news.

[Volta]

Nice news.

Are you also bsd fanboy? Not only xorg? I wonder how many upstream changes have they made? Are they improving graphic stack, KDE, Gnome, XFCE? Or perhaps, they're just leeching?

[johanb]

Are you also bsd fanboy? Not only xorg? I wonder how many upstream changes have they made? Are they improving graphic stack, KDE, Gnome, XFCE? Or perhaps, they're just leeching?

I'm a Wayland and Linux fanboy yet consider this to be good news anyway, what does that make me?

Also, the more systems using mesa the better as that means more testing and development and same goes for KDE, Gnome and XFCE. Why would you consider that to be leeching? Maybe there are rare race conditions or something in the code which becomes more prevalent and easy to reproduce when running under BSD or something.

[Volta]

I'm a Wayland and Linux fanboy yet consider this to be good news anyway, what does that make me?

Also, the more systems using mesa the better as that means more testing and development and same goes for KDE, Gnome and XFCE. Why would you consider that to be leeching? Maybe there are rare race conditions or something in the code which becomes more prevalent and easy to reproduce when running under BSD or something.

https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=bsd

76 bug reports from BSD. Even less, because there are false positives. There's simply neither testing nor support from BSD crowd. Compare this to 10 thousands reports from Linux users.

[George99]

C'mon how many BSD desktop users are out there? I don't think even enough to call them a crowd.

[kpedersen]

Are you also bsd fanboy? Not only xorg? I wonder how many upstream changes have they made? Are they improving graphic stack, KDE, Gnome, XFCE? Or perhaps, they're just leeching?

You have used OpenSSH right? That is one example of a BSD governed and directed project. The openssh-portable project is drip fed to the Linux community for their convenience.

As for NVIDIA, there is a massive push in the FreeBSD community to avoid their hardware. Isn't worth the faff and if you plan to use a 2012 GPU, they would be keeping the whole Xorg back because the silly NVIDIA blob system is not forward compatible. NVIDIA is basically the Internet Explorer 6 of the GPU world

https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=bsd

76 bug reports from BSD. Even less, because there are false positives. There's simply neither testing nor support from BSD crowd. Compare this to 10 thousands reports from Linux users.

Possibly, the BSD crowd has more sense than to waste their time with broken desktop environments. They want to *do* things rather than tinker with GUI fat.

[johanb]

i

https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=bsd

76 bug reports from BSD. Even less, because there are false positives. There's simply neither testing nor support from BSD crowd. Compare this to 10 thousands reports from Linux users.

There are always false positives no matter what platforms we are talking about, same goes for the 10 thousand reports from Linux users.

While they are a minority, KDE have decided that they want to support BSD upstream either because they find it to be minimal maintenance, because they love BSD or because they have a seperate maintainer for BSD that's their decision.
If someone decides to not support BSD that's also fine, that's their decision.
If it's not stable on BSD that's an issue on BSD and not on Linux, if changes related to BSD breaks Linux stability which is the majority of users however then you would have a good argument, but I have never hear of that.

[Volta]

Possibly, the BSD crowd has more sense than to waste their time with broken desktop environments. They want to *do* things rather than tinker with GUI fat.

I'm sometimes looking at alternatives like OpenBSD, so I don't want to end with unsupported desktop.