Understanding Graphics Drivers

If you are having problems with Graphics on FreeBSD, here are some things that you need to know.

• It's very important to keep driver (drm-*-kmod) and firmware (gpu-firmware-kmod) in sync with the kernel. If you are using a release, and running GENERIC, it is enough to download the packages with pkg and install them, but if you are using a custom kernel, or running STABLE or CURRENT, then you need to compile the modules yourself. The easiest way is usually to run (e.g.) pkg delete drm-fbsd11.2-kmod and then pkg autoremove to remove any dependencies, and then build graphics/drm-kmod from ports. This is safe to do even if you are using pre-built packages for the rest of the system. NiclasZeising
  • TODO refactor with DRM

• The reason xf86-video-ati-legacy works with drm-fbsd12.0-kmod is that the updated kmod uses newer APIs etc. At one point, xf86-video-ati was updated to make these work, and when we updated xf86-video-ati in ports to the latest version to get support for more modern hardware, we had to create xf86-video-ati-legacy for use with drm-legacy-kmod. This was always one of those stop-gap measures. NiclasZeising

• I don't have the time or hardware to get an older xf86-video-ati to maybe build with xserver 1.20. I don't know exactly what makes xf86-video-ati-legacy crash, but if you want to get it working, I think that the best course of action is to move it back to 7.9, and then try to backport just as much as needed to get it to compile with xserver 1.20, but still work on drm-legacy-kmod. NiclasZeising

• The modesetting xorg-server driver works fine, and has been working fine for quite a number of years. It is the driver used by default, in the default set up. You need to explicitly install another xf86-video-* driver to get something else. It also should give 3D acceleration (and has always, to my knowledge, done so) […] you don't need for instance xf86-video-intel when using drm-kmod. NiclasZeising

• To my knowledge, it should work on all cards with a modesetting driver (meaning intel, various versions of the AMD/ATI driver, and nVidia, at least). AMD hasn't been as aggressive in deprecating xf86-video-[ati,amdgpu] as intel has been with xf86-video-intel though. This might also be an issue with drm-legacy-kmod vs. drm-kmod. NiclasZeising

• We switched the default to use DRI3 not long after xorg-server was updated to 1.20. NiclasZeising