Re: Intel Haswell support - Any updates?

On Thu, 17 Sep 2015 18:55:10 +0900
"Lundberg, Johannes" <johannes_at_brilliantservice.co.jp> wrote:

> Looking at those pages it seems like development has basically been
> standing still for the last couple of years.
> 
> DragonFlyBSD claims to have support for Haswell, maybe it can work as a
> stand-in while waiting for FreeBSD if you need the GPU for development or
> something..
> 
> 
> On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 6:41 PM, Andreas Nilsson <andrnils_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > I guess interested parties could keep an eye on
> > https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-base-graphics/tree/drm-i915-update-38
> > and https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics
> >
> > Best regards
> > Andreas
> >
> > On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 11:20 AM, Lundberg, Johannes <
> > johannes_at_brilliantservice.co.jp> wrote:
> >
> >> I am wondering the same.. I am sure the very few developers we have are
> >> working as much as they can on this.
> >>
> >> However, the lack of support for the most common hardware since three
> >> years
> >> back is, I believe, preventing many new users, beginners as well as
> >> professionals, from coming to FreeBSD, and I hope the foundation would
> >> pour
> >> some money into this to speed up the development...
> >>
> >> Making it possible to use Wayland on FreeBSD would open up for a whole new
> >> category on devices (mobile, IVI, etc) where many people are now wondering
> >> whether to go Linux, Android or something else.. FreeBSD has the license
> >> and the stability making it very attractive, all that's missing is a
> >> modern
> >> graphics stack..
> >>
> >> If I had the skills or resources I would pitch in but currently I don't so
> >> all I can do is complain to the foundation.
> >>
> >> I would love to see FreeBSD become the de facto OS in these new areas and
> >> it feels like it could be within reach... Or maybe my feeling is way off,
> >> correct me if I'm wrong :)
> >>
> >> Sorry for the rant...
> >>
> >> Johannes
> >>
> >> On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 5:00 PM, Anders Bolt-Evensen <
> >> andersbo87_at_icloud.com>
> >> wrote:
> >>
> >> > Hello!
> >> >
> >> > I'm just curious about how Intel Haswell GPU support in FreeBSD is
> >> coming
> >> > along?
> >> > What's the ETA of when the driver can be tested?
> >> >
> >> > Anders

[...]

It seems FreeBSD has massive problems catching up with the progress in
graphical device support. While "Linux" is concentrated on one single kernel
development, the *BSD have drifted appart over the past decade. My
feeling is that developers start focoussing on one specific *BSD due to the
diversity in their basic architecture.

FreeBSD lacks behind in WiFi chipset support, iGPU support, graphics support in
general as GPUs has become more important over the past years in HPC
environments and not only for displaying. That is a political issue, I guess.
X11 is now claimed by the Linux folks - that is the impression I have - the
spirit of a multiplatform, open system is gone. With systemd on Linux, even
FreeBSD is falling more and more behind. I think this needs to be addressed
on political terrain. Linux wanted to have ZFS - now they participate in
OpenZFS. How long until those L-people move the BSD people aside?

Well, asking for Haswell support is a bit weird - Skylake ante portam.
Broadwell is already there. Two years ago, we purchased Laptops with Haswell
GPUs. They are now about to be replaced by Skylake-based systems. Running
FreeBSD on Laptops with modern WiFi and iGPU hardware is almost impossible.
Dead hardware or extremely slow. So we decided to switch to Linux.

Interesting to hear that DragonFlyBSD seems to have solved several iGPU issues
and FreeBSD not.

The www pages on that matter are outdated and badly maintained - I try to
consult them on news on a regular basis. One has to digg through piles of
mailing lists. The culture of keeping his clients informed hasn't reached
FreeBSD development yet and that makes me wondering.

Well, a stopgap for nVidia Nouveau support seems to be the PRIME support in
FreeBSD's kernel. I do not understand much of that matter, but the kernel is
not well fitted for moving buffers from/to different GPU adaptors. That seems
also to be important for future architectures concerning OpenCL and GPGPU - a
matter I was interested in due to a physical modelling interest. But in that
matter there leads no way around Linux.