your mail
Niclas Zeising
zeising at freebsd.org
Tue May 15 08:07:58 UTC 2018
On 05/15/18 00:47, Emil Velikov wrote:
> On 22 February 2017 at 14:46, Matthew Rezny <rezny at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
>> It has been my intent to upstream as much as possible, but I was trying to get
>> us caught up to current before doing so.
>
> Any idea what happened to this?
>
> Earlier I joined the #freebsd-xorg channel, yet it seems fairly inactive.
> Repeating some of my questions here, hope anyone can shed some light:
>
> - How does FreeBSD handle loading of kernel DRM/GPU modules?
> Is there a daemon of sorts, manually or via hacking the graphics stack
> - Xorg/xf86-video*/etc
>
> - ^^ creating /dev nodes
>
> - How capable is your sysfs compat? Or more importantly how frowned
> upon it is to use it on FreeBSD?
>
> And an extra one:
> - How does one contribute patches to (say the graphics - libdrm/mesa/etc) ports?
> Is there some instructions and CI there I can throw some patches at?
>
Hi!
Thank you for your mail and thanks for reaching out! I was one of the
ones responding on IRC, unfortunately you caught me at a bad time here,
hence my suggestion to send an e-mail.
I know the FreeBSD graphcis effort have been somewhat dormant (yeah,
that's an understatement), but I'm working on getting it going again
with a group of people. It's still in the early stages but hopefully
something will come out of it. We had such a team about 4 or 5 years
back, but people, including myself, got different priorities (you know,
life happens).
Currently, we have a working area and development repos on gitub, which
you can find here https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/, amongst other
things there's a fork of the FreeBSD ports repo there where most ports
development happens. There's no problem getting you access to that one,
and we can also add forks of upstream mesa and drm repos and so on. We
also have a gitter chat that we're trying out. It can be found here:
https://gitter.im/FreeBSDDesktop/Lobby, you're welcome to join there as
well. It's connected to github. The IRC channel #freebsd-xorg is
unfortunately somewhat dormant, because not everyone hangs out there,
but I'm available there as well.
As I said, we're still early in the process, so all details aren't 100%
set yet, but this is what we have going for now.
Now, to your questions. As far as I know, there's no automatic loading
of the graphics modules, apart from the really old stuff. If memory
serves me correctly. The current way of doing it is to load the module
before starting X, usually as part of the boot process. There might be
a hack in xf86-video-intel to load some modules, but not the latest kms
graphics modules.
Creating /dev nodes is handled automatically by devfs and devd. I don't
know how it's done in detail, but it's automatic as far as at least I'm
concerned.
As for sysfs, mmacy gave a good responce on IRC.
For patches and contributing, as I said, we're trying to set up shop on
github (and from there merge into FreeBSD SVN repos). The kernel bits
(what's called drm-next sometimes) are already there, and I've started
working on a ports repo there as well. That's probably the best place
to start. We don't have a CI setup currently, I use the package
building system poudriere locally on my desktop. I can help you get
started with both poudriere and the FreeBSD ports system, and I can also
help with adding patches to the ports and build packages for testing.
I hope to be able to add more automatic building and some sort of CI
solution in the future, but this is where we're at today.
We already have some local patches, they should be upstreamed, but I
haven't had time to work through them, and since I don't know exactly
how they work, it will take some time to get them upstream.
Can I contact you directly to get them upstreamed once they're ready?
Once again, thank you very much for reaching out, and thank you for
reading to the end!
Regards
--
Niclas Zeising
FreeBSD graphics team
More information about the freebsd-x11
mailing list