Need help untangling Xorg behavior on Haswell board, KMS, etc. etc.

[John Reynolds]

Hello all, I recently put together a new box with very new hardware--an 
ASRock Z87 "haswell" board with i-4770k proc. I've successfully 
installed 9.2-PRERELEASE (amd64) on it with the help of some folks on 
-stable, but am having a heck of a time trying to get Xorg working. I've 
used FreeBSD for years and years but have always used Nvidia cards and 
their config tool always just barfed out an xorg.conf file that worked 
no fuss no muss. I'm trying like crazy to get this integrated GPU to work.

I did some research and found out that I needed WITH_NEW_XORG=1 in 
/etc/make.conf and I've got that all compiled now with a ports tree 
freshly updated via portsnap. I have xorg 7.7 port and all of things it 
pulls in including version 2.21.9 of the xf86-video-intel port.

Could some kind soul out there give me some pointers on what the 
"preferred" method for setting up X should be at this point using the 
"new" Xorg and this very new H/W?

If I do what the handbook and other tutorials say to do and run

    Xorg -configure

that creates me a file that defines two screens/monitors, etc. That's 
great and all, but I don't use a dual-head setup. yes, I can hack the 
file and take out the other monitor stuff. But my buddy who lives in the 
Linux world asked me "why are you creating a xorg.conf file? I haven't 
used one in YEARS. You don't hardly need one for 'modern' hardware where 
everything is probable and works nicely with each other." So that got me 
to wondering "yeah, why am i creating it?"

So, in the expert opinion of people working actively with Xorg on this 
list, what should "most people" do (most people buying 'modern' hardware 
these days and not using CRT monitors from the 1980's anymore :)? I have 
fired up "xinit" (using just a simplistic .xinitrc and a tmp non-root 
user for testing) with the setup file created from above AND without any 
setup file at all. Both seem to work. xdpyinfo shows that the resolution 
is 1920x1200 which I want by default, color depth seems fine, etc. What 
is the "preferred" setup style?

Now onto the problems / questions: No matter what I do whether firing up 
with the xorg.conf file or without anything, if I exit the window 
manager and expect to come back to the console it doesn't do it. It just 
locks the machine HARD. I searched quite a bit about this and on this 
list's archives (here 
<http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-x11/2013-July/013446.html>) 
I see some mention that something called KMS is now being used in the 
Intel driver/Xorg and that something doesn't react well with our newcons 
console driver. What exactly is KMS and why is it important? Also if I 
look at my Xorg.0.log file as it's firing up I get tons of messages 
about dri devices not being found, etc.

[    41.710] drmOpenDevice: node name is /dev/dri/card0
[    41.710] Failed to change owner or group for file /dev/dri! 2: No 
such file or directory
[    41.710] Failed to change owner or group for file /dev/dri/card0! 2: 
No such file or directory
[    41.710] drmOpenDevice: open result is -1, (No such file or directory)
[    41.710] Failed to change owner or group for file /dev/dri/card0! 2: 
No such file or directory
[    41.710] drmOpenDevice: open result is -1, (No such file or directory)
[    41.710] drmOpenDevice: Open failed
[    41.710] drmOpenByBusid: Searching for BusID pci:0000:00:02.0

Is there something that must be done in a custom kernel or something to 
remedy this? I have dri-8.0.5_3,2 installed and right now I am just 
running the GENERIC kernel from the install.

Thanks in advance to any/all who respond!

-Jr