Need help untangling Xorg behavior on Haswell board, KMS, etc. etc.
John Reynolds
johnjen at reynoldsnet.org
Tue Jul 23 18:07:00 UTC 2013
On 7/23/2013 4:00 AM, Niclas Zeising wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I'll try to answer all your questions below, as well as try to answer
> things from your follow-up mail. Hopefully no confusion will arise.
thanks :)
> When buying/building computers based on new hardware, remember that it
> might take a little while before support for it shows up in FreeBSD. In
> general most things work out of the box, but sometimes that is not the
> case. I am not sure the Haswell GPU is supported by our graphics stack yet.
I had a feeling that might be the case when I was contemplating doing
it--but I know things will eventually get fixed. :) ... plus I just came
off a very difficult project and wanted to treat myself to some nice new
hardware, the risks be damned :)
> In general, running without a xorg.conf should work, but there are a lot
> of different hardware and setups out there, and just because it works on
> Linux does not mean it works on FreeBSD without xorg.conf. If you want
> to have more control of exactly what's going on, a config is probably to
> prefer.
OK
> KMS, or Kernel Mode Setting, is the "new" way of handling graphics in
> X. basically a lot of stuff regarding the graphics card was previously
> done in userland, however this makes it hard to get working graphics
> acceleration and stuff, so a lot of this has moved into the kernel,
> which means new kernel drivers are needed. An Intel KMS driver was
> ported by kib@ and comitted a little over a year ago. Currently an
> ATI/AMD KMS driver is under development, however it will take some
> time before it is done. Without these drivers, we loose support for a
> lot of modern hardware, which is part of the reason we have two xorg
> distributions today. This new KMS driver isn't without some issues
> though. Currently, when you enable it by loading the kld (which is
> done when starting X) the VT console no longer works, since it doesn't
> understand and support KMS. This is one of the reasons that the new
> xorg distribution isn't the default. Once newcons is finished and
> pushed into the FreeBSD source tree, the console should work with KMS.
> This might be what you perceive as a lockup.
yeah, it seems like it. One other person had mentioned it was the
console code that needed to understand KMS. I
> Generally, it is possible to shut down the computer either from a
> xterm (or other terminal emulator) or using the powerbutton once out
> of X. However, there might be issues between the new graphics card and
> FreeBSD that makes it hang.
I can use the power button to take it down, but the filesystems are
never shutdown properly when I do that for some reason. but with SU+J on
the partitions now I haven't yet seen it not "fix itself" instantly upon
boot.
> This is probably normal, it is looking for the graphics card device,
> but can't find it. Either the kernel module didn't attached to the
> graphics card, or it just shows up as a different device. What does
> dmesg and kldstat say once you've started X?
kldstat did show the i915drm module as loaded, I remember .....
> Looking at this log, it seems that it first loads the intel driver,
> but since that doesn't work, it falls back to using the VESA driver.
> You can try to force the use of the intel driver in xorg.conf,
> however, this might render your X unusable. I suggest you post your
> dmesg and kldstat after you've started X, to see if the intel kms
> kernel module is loaded and attached to the graphics card. It might
> very well be that the current kernel driver doesn't support haswell.
> Have you tried CURRENT as well?
I have not tried -current yet. I generally have never run -current in
the past except the transition from 4.x to 5.x briefly.....
I'm in the midst of reconfiguring the same machine (I made a boo boo in
disk partitioning and needed to fix it and reinstall the whole ball of
wax again) and will look at the dmesg output after I go into X (having
it fallback to the VESA driver at this point of course).
Thanks for your reply!
-Jr
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