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Greg V greg at unrelenting.technology
Wed May 16 12:43:12 UTC 2018



On Wed, May 16, 2018 at 12:48 PM, blubee blubeeme <gurenchan at gmail.com> 
wrote:
> 
> There's absolutely no reason for anyone to invest any resources into
> developing a proper graphics stack for FreeBSD if the FreeBSD devs 
> are only
> going to rely on Jerry-rigged stuff from Linux.
> 
> The mailing list is bombarded by regressions and issues with the 
> Linuxkpi
> stuff. For lightweight stuff sure, use the Linuxkpi if u have to but 
> for a
> major component of the platform, that's just pathetic.
> 
> There are talented devs out there who can get the work done, they 
> just need
> to be financing, then organized.
> 
> Seeing as most other platforms got their networking stack from BSD, 
> it's a
> sad state when FreeBSD has to use Linuxkpi to get networking drivers.
> 
> If stating that the FreeBSD graphics stack is in a sad position is
> "shitting on people" then I'm guilty of that.
> 
> I just know that we can and should do better.

As if the graphics stack doesn't have lots of issues and regressions 
*on Linux*.
Heck, proprietary vendor drivers on Windows often have worse issues 
than the open source graphics stack!

FreeBSD is not in a sad position, it's in a great position.
I'm literally writing this from a Weston desktop that uses atomic 
modesetting on AMDGPU DC (on a Polaris card). VA-API video acceleration 
works. Vulkan (RADV) works both in X11 and Wayland apps. OpenCL 
(Clover) works. Overclocking the GPU and VRAM works.
This is awesome! I can't imagine anything better. A couple years ago we 
barely had i915 Haswell support.

There is NOTHING wrong with a compatibility layer like LinuxKPI. The 
only better way would be a standardized kernel interface that all 
Unix-like kernels agree on. Good luck with getting them to agree on 
*anything*.

And yeah, speaking of network, my Mellanox ConnectX-2 works fine. So 
both of the things I have plugged into PCIe on my tower have LinuxKPI 
based drivers :P


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