drm-legacy-kmod vs. drm-kmod

[Greg V]

Mar 10, 2020 8:04:21 PM Robert Huff <roberthuff at rcn.com>:

> > > I have an older machine with an on-board ATI Radeon HD3300.
> >
> > Have you tried modern radeonkms on it (from drm-kmod not legacy)?
>
> I have not; existing information strongly suggests that will not
> work.

Always try everything yourself! It's not that hard.


> > > According to the "FreeBSD Graphics Blog" on github, that line
> > > (for AMD) is the HD7000 (family) chipset.
> >
> > "HD7000 family" is kind of a meaningless marketing term: it includes
> > TeraScale 2, GCN 1 and GCN 2.
> >
>
> I'm only quoting the blog. :-(
> <does further quick research>
> Let's assume for the moment I'm talking about the HD7730 and
> higher.
> This is not about increased hardware performance; the old chip
> did just fine for that system. It's about having the hardware to
> support the software that's in active development.

radeonkms is still supported – so everything R600, from the earliest HD something to the R5 ones, should work.

Active *development* is happening on GCN GPUs supported by amdgpu.


Keep in mind that our "legacy" port is.. well.. legacy *in terms of porting*. It's manually ported instead of writing a compatibility layer which is how the current port works.
The legacy port is stuck on older Linux code because of that, but *Linux did not drop support for older GPUs in the same drivers* so the new port should work just as well.