Direct Rendering on FreeBSD

FreeBSD currently supports the following DRM/DRI devices in its base system with the x11/xorg meta-port:

• Intel i915 (i830 through G45) (i915drm)
• Intel Ironlake and later supported with KMS patchset on 9.x and CURRENT with WITH_NEW_XORG and WITH_KMS set in your environment.
• ATI Mach 64 (mach64drm)
• Matrox G200-G550 AGP (mgadrm)
• ATI Rage 128 (r128drm)
• ATI Radeon through X1950 and pre-HD IGP parts (radeondrm)
• ATi Radeon HD2350 through HD4890 - see the notes for details (radeondrm)
• S3 Savage through Pro Savage (savagedrm)
• SiS 300-series (300/305, 315, 540, 630, 661, 730) (sisdrm)
• 3dfx Voodoo Banshee through Voodoo5 (tdfxdrm)
• Via Unichrome (viadrm) on 9-CURRENT only at present

This information is badly out of date at present. This page will be updated with information regarding the new structure of the xorg port in the coming days as I test the various combinations of driver and card.

IMPORTANT Users of the nVidia binary driver attempting to use the nvidia-driver port with WITH_NEW_XORG set will find GL acceleration slow, to the tune of a frame a second at best. You need to use driver version 290.10 to take advantage of xorg-server-1.10.6. 295.40 will NOT work, confirmed here in testing.

The Openchrome driver exists in ports as x11-drivers/xf86-video-openchrome and is installed by default with the xorg-drivers metaport due to the retirement of the via(4x) driver. 9-CURRENT has Openchrome kernel DRM. There are blocking issues with nouveau and openchrome which preclude MFC at present.

There is support for almost complete R6/700 3D hardware acceleration in 8.2-RELEASE, 8-STABLE and 9-CURRENT. There is currently no DRI support for Evergreen based cards (HD5xxx) or Northern Islands (HD6xxx) although 2D only support exists in xf86-video-ati.

There are also ongoing efforts to port Nouveau, an attempt to reverse engineer the binary nVidia drivers and create a free, open nVidia driver, based on the obfuscated nv(4x) driver. Unfortunately, Nouveau is a casualty of the KMS work for Intel cards. WITHOUT_NOUVEAU knob no longer has any effect.

Xorg's drivers and DRI/DRM are currently in a state of flux with new technology (KMS, DRI2, GEM, TTM, Gallium3D etc.) being introduced upstream. The cutting edge development often happens with Linux primarily in mind and porting to FreeBSD is no small task. Unfortunately, this could lead to some instability for people who update their ports/packages regularly as the X server and drivers start implementing these, especially with Intel devices whose drivers are becoming more and more dependent on GEM. Work is being done to keep these devices operating as well as possible but there may still be breakage.