Ars Technica article

[Pete Wright]

  What direction change are you talking about?
> As alluded to earlier; the importation of so much Linux code. On one
> hand; yes it shortens the time-to-implementation. But in the broader
> scope; it's more work (and time) in the long term for it's removal,
> and replacement -- assuming that day ever arrives.

this misses the key point that there is literally *zero* people being 
paid full-time to implement graphics drivers for FreeBSD, whereas at 
both Intel and AMD developers are being paid to develop drivers for the 
linux kernel.  They are also getting access to documentation and other 
resources on how these chips are implemented which I am not certain we 
have access to either.

as such it seems like a good opportunity for us to leverage this work 
that is being done for the linux kernel (warts and all) to get better 
coverage to modern GPU's on FreeBSD.

> The Kpi is also a kludge, and with it comes a performance hit.
How is it a kludge, and what is the performance hit in real numbers?  
Regarding perf numbers there is no data to back this up because there 
has not been enough work to get the testing & benchmarking suites 
working in a reliable state on FreeBSD.

As a counterpoint, I periodically run OpenBSD which as gone in a 
different direction of implementing their own drivers for i915.  I would 
say subjectively the performance with their implementation is several 
orders of magnitude less performant than FreeBSD's - but you know what, 
that is OK!  They have different objectives and approaches which is 
totally healthy IMHO.

We just need to be honest that their are trade offs that will be taken 
with either approach - and perf is one of the most obvious and noisy areas.

>
> Is there really that little interest in the Graphics area/dept. that
> what we've currently been using couldn't be sustained/improved?
>

I would say yes!

Until this work began we had support for older i915 graphics but that 
development had stalled while hardware most definitely had *not* 
stalled.  The situation that we are at now is a direct result of this - 
someone stood up and got things working, entropy took over and support 
was added and improved.

There is nothing preventing others from standing up and implementing 
non-linux derived graphics drivers though!  I would just suggest taking 
a moment to understand how much of a lift this work is from a dev 
perspective, let alone support after bits land.  At the end of the day 
most people just assume graphics to work so they can get on with their 
real work they need to accomplish.

Not trying to start a flame, just offering perspective from things i've 
observed through this process...
-pete

-- 
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
@nomadlogicLA