Re: 3.0-STABLE / drm-kmod / dual radeon problems

On Fri, 20 Aug 2021 06:56:27 -0500
Scott Bennett <bennett@sdf.org> wrote:

> Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe@freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, Aug 19, 2021 at 11:51:36AM -0700, John Kennedy wrote:  
> > > [resending to freebsd-x11@ vs x11@]
> > > 
> > > I'm making my semi-annual attempt to convert a windows box to a FreeBSD
> > > box and having the same kind of issues.  It is a Dell Optiplex 9020 with
> > > dual radeon cards (and currently 3 monitors, 4 if I can get it to work).  
> >
> > Similar question (about dual Radeon cards) had been asked on this list
> > before* and never answered, AFAIK.  Apparently, this configuration does
> > not look interesting for developers to test and provide support for. :(
> >
> > ./danfe
> >
> > *) https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-x11/2020-September/026609.html
> >  
>      I will add that they also seem unwilling to answer whether a firmware bug
> that hangs a single Radeon card has even been reported upstream, whether to
> X.org or to AMD.  They are also unwilling to say whether the DRM bug that
> attempts to perform a hard reboot (i.e., without so much as sync(), let alone an
> orderly shutdown with UFS unmounts, etc.) in response to a hung GPU has been
> reported upstream.
>      It ought to be a FreeBSD Foundation project to drum up money to hire a
> professional GPU programmer (perhaps part-time) and a full-time programmer for
> CPU-side graphics support.  The latter could devote some of his time toward
> managing the graphics team's projects and objectives.  With these, perhaps
> FreeBSD could finally have native graphics support instead of having to import
> ever more of the LINUX kernel into FreeBSD in order to have graphics, even buggy
> graphics, at all.
> 

Why should the manufacturers of graphics hardware jump on a FreeBSD
bandwagon when they already have lots of Linux developers either
employed or with NDAs available to do the dirty work?

I must say that the project is lucky that Nvidia is still willing to
provide drivers to FreeBSD.

Based on my experience from the time when I was developing drivers for
ISDN cards for FreeBSD, hardware vendors simply don't have FreeBSD on
their radars.  Even though I signed a NDA with AVM (one of the bigger
ISDN card vendors), I couldn't get any useful information from them at
all.  I was basically forced to reverse engineer the Linux drivers. 
Evidently, Linux developers were considered to be a more interesting
target than any BSD developer.  And that is still the case today.

-- 
Gary Jennejohn