i915kms for Meteor Lake: realistic timeline sought for support

Folks,

TL;DR: After being told my cheap and old laptop wasn’t any good for performance-demanding FreeBSD work (e.g. building VSCode), I bought a new laptop. But…

* it uses Meteor Lake chipset
* thus does not work in 14.2/3
* is thus only likely to be supported in the near future on 15.0-CURRENT (with even an MFC looking fraught)
* and presently is not working on current HEAD

I didn’t realize this chip was such a complicator. My research suggests that supporting this change is Really Hard (tm). The related issues/branches seem to be in a state of high churn, force-push, and inconsistent signal, so I’m not sure how to estimate a timeline to leaving a pure-VT experience.* In the most earnest way possible and with humility and in full and total reverence for and gratitude toward souls whose brilliance lets them write *video drivers*:

Should I return this computer and wait until 15.0-RELEASE? And how can I know that the video hardware will be supported then/when I buy an alternative? My return window closes shortly so a decision is pressing.

*OR*

Is Meteor Lake support just a moment away and my services as an early adopter would be appreciated — FWIW: I’ve run all the experimental code to contribute test data.

Either way, perhaps my experience helps us all see the value of the Foundation’s investment in project-laptop — and maybe that’s a good thing to share. My experience is what a lot of eager, would-be adopters are running into out of the gate, and many of them wouldn’t have the *ahem* decades of Unix use that I have under my belt to even reason about what’s going wrong.

Steven

(Longer)

I started out with FreeBSD on a spare laptop I had laying around to see if I liked it enough to keep it. I did! Working through the quirks was something I valued enough to document for others[0]. But when I tried to build VSCode I was  laughed out of the building​​ politely informed that my old machine wasn't really feasible as a platform[1]. Fair enough. So I bought a new Asus Zenbook. I opted for Intel (not NVidia) graphics for ease. I expected the i915kms driver to work[2].

After struggling to get iwlwifi working (including building a custom usb installer with the requisite firmware and module code), I got to a 14.3 system with network. Awesome. I then tried to build the drm-kmod module again, as I'd done before [3]. Obviously, this winds up not working due to firmware and a host of other concerns. This drove me to 15.0-CURRENT where I’ve been since in a pure-VT existence.

I've been tracking the work around drm-kmod[4] in proj-laptop and it seems stalled based on drm-kmod[5].The release schedule[6] suggests, as I read it, that I might be waiting until December for a stable 15.0 release.

*: TBH, VT-only is not horrible, as I grew up on x86’s dialing up to a SCO terminal and I’ve always had a love for European teletext services and Minitel. It’s awesome for focus... But for what I paid, I’d like to be able to load a graphical environment, sleep on lid close, or not have to rely on my mouse-less tmux-or-die skills just to get through the day.

[0]: https://stevengharms.com/longform/my-first-freebsd/
[1]: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/vscode-extremely-long-build-builds-linux-on-the-way.97740/
[2] https://www.freshports.org/graphics/drm-kmod
[3]: https://stevengharms.com/longform/my-first-freebsd/installation/part-2-power-management/
[4]: https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop/issues/47
[5]: https://github.com/freebsd/drm-kmod/pull/332

[6]: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/15.0R/schedule/

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