Status of Intel Broadwell GPU Support??

[Bob Willcox]

On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 02:44:41PM -0700, Pete Wright wrote:
> (replying off-list)
> 
> 
> On 03/21/17 13:18, Bob Willcox wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 11:29:48AM -0700, Pete Wright wrote:
> >> On 03/21/2017 11:22, Bob Willcox wrote:
> >>> Can someone fill me in on what the current status of support for the Intel
> >>> Broadwell GPUs is? I had been running with the scfb driver on one of my
> >>> systems (Intel NUC with an i7-5557U CPU) up until recently when I had to
> >>> reboot it. I had updated the ports about a week earlier and just yesterday had
> >>> to reboot it due to a power outage here.
> >>>
> >>> I haven't seen much mention/activity regarding the new i915 support for the
> >>> newer Intel GPUs and was hoping that there might be some documentation that I
> >>> could be pointed to so I can understand what all needs to be done to upgrade
> >>> to and run it.
> >>>
> >>> Note that I'm currently running 10.3-stable but would be willing to update to
> >>> something more current if necessary.
> >>>
> >>> Thanks in advance for any info or pointers you can offer!
> >> Hey there Bob, you may want to take a look at TrueOS which is based on
> >> FreeBSD but they have been aggressively importing new drm code to
> >> support newer Intel GPU's.
> >>
> >> https://www.trueos.org/
> >>
> >> If you are comfortable tracking and building CURRENT yourself, you can
> >> try the drm-next branch at this github repository:
> >>
> >> https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics
> >> https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics/wiki
> >>
> >> I don't remember if the latest drm-next code is required for Broadwell
> >> CPU's, but this code works well for my on my Skylake system.  Both
> >> approaches should allow you to use accelerated GPU graphics on your
> >> system though.
> >>
> >> Cheers,
> >> -pete
> >>
> >> -- 
> >> Pete Wright
> >> pete at nomadlogic.org
> >> @nomadlogicLA
> >>
> > Hi Chris,
> >
> > Thanks for the pointers and info. I may look into TrueOS but in the past when
> > I gave a try with PC-BSD I found I missed some important (to me) aspects of
> > FreeBSD. One of them was the ctwm window manager which I have been using on
> > FreeBSD since about '94. Maybe I could run it on TrueOS but the desktop
> > manager that it defaulted to mostly got in my way.
> 
> yea i ran into the same issues as well :)  they do have a live image 
> that loads the appropriate graphics driver, so it may be worth taking it 
> for a spin to see how hardware compatibility works before diving into 
> the freebsd-base-graphics branch.
> 
> > I will probably go with the FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics path and see
> > how I fair with that.
> >
> > Wish me luck!
> 
> good luck! :)
> 
> -p
> 
> -- 
> Pete Wright
> pete at nomadlogic.org
> @nomadlogicLA

Hooray!! My system is up and running the FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics version!

The download, build, & install was mostly uneventful. Thanks again for your help!

Bob

-- 
Bob Willcox    | You're dead, Jim.
bob at immure.com |       -- McCoy, "The Tholian Web", stardate unknown
Austin, TX     |