Any chance for ATI Radeon 8470 HD graphics ?

Manish Jain bourne.identity at hotmail.com
Sat Aug 13 19:06:03 UTC 2016


On 13-Aug-16 17:30, freebsd-x11-request at freebsd.org wrote:
> On 08/12/16 08:18, Manish Jain wrote:

Hi,
I have a system with onboard ATI Radeon 8470 HD graphics adapter.
I am currently having to use the vesa driver because radeon does not
work correctly with the chipset. (On Linux, it does, but not on FreeBSD).
Is there any chance we could see support for my chipset in an upcoming
release ?

In case it is needed, my system is FreeBSD 10.3 amd64 with AMD A6-6400K
(Richland) processor paired with Asus A68HM (FM2 socket) motherboard.

> Preach it*LOUD*, brother !!!! There are a whole family of AMD APU's
> (Jaguar, Richland, Kabini, Kaveri etc.) which are apparently rather
> widely used in laptops & some tablets & other low power machines, &
> (*VERY*) sadly unsupported in FreeBSD :-( ....
>
> -- William A. Mahaffey III

This is most unfortunate. I had purchased the motherboard and processor 
hoping to move to FreeBSD as the only OS. It turns out that FreeBSD is 
the only OS which does not work with Radeon HD 8470D graphics. Windows 
does, Linux does, but FreeBSD does not. Between running FreeBSD with the 
vesa driver (which does not let me play videos smoothly) and the 
alternatives, I find it much better to run my hardware on Windows XP for 
the time being, despite the fact that 1) MS does not support XP; 2) this 
beats the purpose of my hardware upgrade.

One thing that baffles about FreeBSD is not that FreeBSD is picky about 
the hardware supported, but there is no way to determine in advance 
whether certain hardware will work on not. It should not be difficult to 
put up a web page which lists hardware compatibility ratings for the 
most popular hardware available online. Since things like CPU, disk 
drives, memory modules, monitor, keyboard and mouse always work, as a 
desktop user, I only need hardware compatibility scores for graphics 
adapter, sound card, ethernet adapter, printer/scanner. If I could 
easily see which currently available adapter/card/printer is supported, 
it makes life easier for everyone - for me buying the hardware, for 
FreeBSD users looking to support the OS and the hardware it runs on. 
This also becomes a strong incentive to hardware manufacturers to ensure 
that their hardware works on FreeBSD; because it would be flashing news 
if their competitor's hardware works while theirs doesn't.

When purchasing hardware, I have a couple of times tried to enquire from 
freebsd mailing lists whether certain hardware will work or not. Nobody 
replies. It seems a mantra in the freebsd community - "We do not comment 
on hardware compatibility upfront". It would, in my humble opinion, be 
better to go in the opposite direction - if an online portal and a 
dedicated mailing list could actually discuss hardware compatibility, it 
makes things better for hardware buyers as well as FreeBSD itself.

In the current situation, I have written many, many messages to various 
mailing lists and freebsd experts detailing the problem with Radeon HD 
8470D graphics. The only comment I have so far is the William A. 
Mahaffey III message, which clearly says that Richland graphics don't 
work. I am even willing to buy a new nvidia graphics card if that could 
make my FreeBSD system workable, but there is not even a single nvidia 
card available at Amazon/Flipkart which I can see mentioned as supported 
on the FreeBSD Graphics web page. The only cards listed there are ages 
old and possibly very expensive cards. Not even a single card with the 
current bunch of 210/610/710/730 chipsets is referred on that page. 
Isn't that strange ?

-- 
Regards,
Manish Jain


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