Graphics on arm64

[greg at unrelenting.technology]

January 25, 2020 5:07 PM, "John F Carr" <jfc at mit.edu> wrote:

> What happens if I put a PCIe graphics card in a 64 bit ARM system? If I parse the ports tree
> correctly there is no X support, or possibly only support as a generic VGA device. Is that correct?
> Is anybody on freebsd-arm working on graphics? If there's active interest I may be able to help,
> but it's not a project I want to take on alone.
> 
> I see three packages in ports/graphics:
> 
> drm-legacy-kmod is marked broken for aarch64
> drm-current-kmod is only for x86 and PPC
> drm-devel-kmod is only for x86 and PPC

I guess nobody bothered to fix the whitelist in the port, but devel should work if it's up to date with git — I made Radeon work last summer: https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/kms-drm/pull/154 :)

> Historically getting graphics cards to work has often required binary-only Linux drivers which
> wouldn't be available for ARM. Maybe that's not true for Radeon these days. But even today the
> strategy seems to be "take whatever Linux can give us".

"Binary-only" is only true for nvidia, and even then it's not Linux-only (they support FreeBSD and OpenSolaris), and then there's nouveau (which we don't have ported, but NetBSD does).

When Intel ships their discrete PCIe GPUs, they could also be made to work on ARM! :D But for now it's only Radeon.