suggested xorg-compatible video HW for FreeBSD/amd64 ?

[Kostik Belousov]

On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 01:04:14PM -0500, Jung-uk Kim wrote:
> On Tuesday 29 November 2011 04:00 am, Gary Jennejohn wrote:
> > On Mon, 28 Nov 2011 18:46:23 -0700 (MST)
> >
> > Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> wrote:
> > > On Mon, 28 Nov 2011, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> > > > Just a quick reminder as it seems to be forgotten too
> > > > often...radeonhd has not been supported or updated in a long
> > > > time and is generally a bad choice. Modern Radeon (4xxx) is
> > > > supported much better with the ati driver which is still
> > > > getting some love.
> > > >
> > > > Since Radeon is open-source, you might expect good support, but
> > > > it also depends on kernel mode setting and requires custom KMS
> > > > DRI code in the kernel which I am not sure anyone is working on
> > > > for FreeBSD.
> > > >
> > > > Maybe when the Intel KMS is completed...
> > >
> > > The Foundation has expressed interest in funding someone to work
> > > on it. http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=27255
> > >
> > > Spread the word.
> > >
> > > Kostik Belousov has said he won't be workin on the radeon driver.
> > > Don't know why.  If anyone can be found to work on it, I'm pretty
> > > sure a bunch of people would be willing to individually
> > > contribute additional funding or hardware.
> >
> > I don't think he wants to take on TTM.  Could also be that he
> > doesn't have any hardware, which would IMO be a major problem for
> > whomever takes this on considering the rate at which AMD/ATI brings
> > new chips to market.  High-end cards, which are usually the first
> > to market, can be quite expensive.
> 
> I believe major hurdle is porting TTM but the future of this API is 
> not so bright.  In fact, X.org ATI driver uses GEM API now and it is 
> internally mapped to TTM calls by Linux DRM (aka "GEM-ified TTM 
> manager").  Unfortunately, as always, I don't see clear plans from 
> Linux/X.org developers.  I can only guess few possibilities.
> 
> 1. Linux/X.org folks drop GEM-ified TTM and use native GEM calls.
> 2. Linux/X.org folks drop GEM-ified TTM and use native TTM calls.
> 3. Linux/X.org folks re-invent new wheels (again).
> 4. No change.
> 
> My guess is #1 is most likely scenario in the near future.  Even if 
> Linux/X.org folks don't do it, we may be able to implement it without 
> TTM because X.org ATI driver uses GEM API already and we do not have 
> AMD/ATI Catalyst driver for FreeBSD anyway.  So, I guess we have two 
> choices ATM:
> 
> 1. Fully porting TTM, GEM-ified TTM, and KMS.
> 2. Replacing GEM-ified TTM with GEM and porting KMS.
> 
> BTW, I am not volunteering. ;-)
GEM is sort of API, which provides the interface between user and kernel
callers and the real code managing the GPU. TTM is memory manager,
which was designed for GPUs that have on-board memory and also can
access host memory.  Besides memory manager, you also need a thick
layer of card-specific code. This is only for the execution part.

I already stated several times that I will port TTM if somebody
takes care of the card specific execution code and KMS. I found that
KMS is not very interesting for me.

Another problem with already ported Intel driver and possibly ported
Radeon driver is the need for shared pool of people interested in
taking the updates from Linux and merging it back to FreeBSD. This is
definitely not hard to do, e.g the merge of changes from the 3.2
merge window took ~5 hours of my time. but I do not want to do
this forever.
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