CURRENT: Intel Haswell KMS support?

[Arthur Chance]

On 31/12/2014 20:48, O. Hartmann wrote:
> Am Wed, 31 Dec 2014 21:02:35 +0100
> Matthias Apitz <guru at unixarea.de> schrieb:
>
>> El día Wednesday, December 31, 2014 a las 08:30:11PM +0100, O. Hartmann escribió:
>>
>>> I've already switched a bunch of  Haswell-based notebooks to a Linux system due to the
>>> lack of iGPU support. It is ridiculous to purchase outdated hardware (IvyBridge and
>>> less or outdated graphics hardware).
>>
>> Is VESA an option for you until Haswell support comes up in FreeBSD? The
>> question is serious, because I'm on the way to install -HEAD in an Acer C720
>> cromebook with Haswell too.
>>
>> As well I do run (just for tests) Xorg with VESA on my current netbook
>> Acer D250 (which has an old Intel chip) and I do not note any
>> difference.
>>
>> 	matthias
>
> On a Lenovo ThinkPad E540/L540 with Haswell i5-4200M or i5-4210M with iGPU 4600 and
> nVidia 740M Optimus GPU I hadn't success using the VESA driver. The display has a
> HD resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixel, which seems to make VESA unusable. I had to use
> x86-video-scfb - which is a pain in the ass: extremely slow, keystrokes sometimes pass
> through from the console to the graphics screen (it looks like this, I have no better
> desription for that phenomenon). Under load, X11 is unusable since the CPU has to render
> the whole screen alone.
>
> A similar situation arose with Lenovo ThinkPad X240 with high resolution screens and
> Haswell/HD4600 iGPU.
>
> I'm not familiar with the VESA driver. I left that path due to its resolution
> limitations. We deal with modern hardware and I'm not willing to purchase outdated
> hardware for the sake of the OS. On most laptops with Haswell CPUs we migrated to Linux
> - with great success. As a sideeffect things run more smooth right now. Lenovo offers a
> new type of WiFi NIC which also isn't supported by FreeBSD. The problem with Lenovo is
> that their UEFI doesn't allow to simply swap the miniPCIe WiFi NIC for a supported
> device. With most recent and modern products from Lenovo and FreeBSD (even CURRENT) we
> ended up dead in the water.
>
> In general there is a serious problem with the graphics support in FreeBSD. Recent
> hardware from AMD and Intel isn't supported, only nVidia offers support via their BLOB.
> FreeBSD dropped also the nouveau driver.

This is being written on a machine with an Intel i7-4790K CPU (Devil's 
Canyon, i.e. Haswell) and a Dell U2711 2560x1440 monitor. The X VESA 
driver works fine for me at native resolution. OK, I'm not a gamer and I 
don't do anything that needs fast 3D, but it works well enough that my 
first thought after reading the original post was "Haswell graphics 
aren't supported???" because I'd completely forgotten I was using the 
VESA driver. Using a vt console rather than sc I have no problem 
dropping out of X back into console mode either.

-- 
Those who do not learn from computing history are doomed to
GOTO 1