drm-i915kms + x11-intel eats out all of the ram and swap but not with x11-scfb

[Jan Beich]

Tomasz CEDRO <tomek at cedro.info> writes:

> On Wed, Apr 15, 2020 at 2:41 AM Theron wrote:
>
>> Shame to see xf86-video-intel being treated as if it's deprecated
>> software meanwhile modesetting driver lags behind it on this basic level
>> of image quality.
>
> Wow, I also noticed a bit better picture quality with Intel driver,
> but I was not sure if this is the driver thing, now it gets more
> probable when also you mention it. To be honest I was a bit surprised
> that it even worked :-) :-)

xf86-video-intel support ends after CoffeeLake. Current version in ports/
is more than 1 year old, so maybe try the patch in bug 236003.

Outside of DDX Intel deprecated pre-Broadwell support:
- beignet is abandoned in favor of compute-runtime (aka NEO)
- intel-vaapi-driver is maintenance-only in favor of media-driver
- i965 development slowed down in favor of iris (default since Mesa 20.0.0)

> I guess this new modesetting driver will catch up quickly and get into
> the point of better picture quality.. maybe there is some additional
> setup that could improve things already?

Unlikely. modesetting reached "good enough" level while X11 is
deprecated in favor of Wayland. Compared to Mesa or Wayland compositors
there's little activity in xserver repo nowadays.

See also https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/24

Given modesetting uses glamor picture quality may depend on Mesa.
Try using more recent version, especially "iris" driver.

https://github.com/myfreeweb/freebsd-ports-dank/blob/lite/graphics/mesa-dev
https://github.com/evadot/freebsd-ports/tree/mesa/graphics/mesa
https://reviews.freebsd.org/D23161