Xorg & i810 graphics / loader.conf / kldstat

[OgreNaut]

Originally Posted by richardpl

In other words switching Xorg drivers will not improve OP situation in any way (as side efect it may make it even worse).

So what do you suggest??? You sound very knowledgeable.

- Ogre

[OgreNaut]

I'm in luck! I just remembered a couple of old PCI slot video cards I have tucked way in a box. Those'll probably have better results. Seems like the i810 chipset is an oddball.

- Ogre

[OgreNaut]

Got it going with an old Riva128 card! LOL! Sweet! This card is only 11 years old, but it feels more like 20. Only runs in 8-bit or lower, but it's at 1280x1024. Funny stuff.

- Joe

[BSDfan666]

Originally Posted by OgreNaut

Got it going with an old Riva128 card! LOL! Sweet! This card is only 11 years old, but it feels more like 20. Only runs in 8-bit or lower, but it's at 1280x1024. Funny stuff.

- Joe

That's odd, I don't see why it would be restricted to 8bpp, did you try 16?

Also, I'd recommend avoiding Nvidia cards, new or old.. they're all pretty much undocumented in the Unix world.

[OgreNaut]

Originally Posted by BSDfan666

That's odd, I don't see why it would be restricted to 8bpp, did you try 16?

Also, I'd recommend avoiding Nvidia cards, new or old.. they're all pretty much undocumented in the Unix world.

I tried it. It spit back an error saying that the driver doesn't support 16bpp. No big deal. This is mainly a tinkering box, not a primary workstation. I won't be using X that much anyway. I'm more interested in getting comfortable under the hood.

Agreed on the Nvidia stance. Closed drivers are bad. But how do you argue with a spare card that just happens to be handy? I have an ATI Mach64 laying around too, but it's from 1991; even older than the Riva.

- Ogre

[richardpl]

Originally Posted by OgreNaut

Neither of these are present in output from kldstat OR "kldstat-v". I grep'd 'em to make sure.

Now what? Manually load those in loader.conf?

Yes, load them manually:
# kldload drm i915

and add following lines in /boot/loader.conf:

drm_load="YES"
i915_load="YES"

After loading drm and i915 please post output of:

$ dmesg|tail

[richardpl]

Originally Posted by OgreNaut

Where might I find this mythical intel driver thou speakest of? From what I can tell, there is no maintained "intel" driver for FreeBSD anymore. The FreeBSD ports archive states that it was last released in 2007 and has now been deemed deprecated (http://www.freebsdsoftware.org/x11-d...deo-intel.html). Of course, I could always try building from source using the code from the good folks at http://intellinuxgraphics.org, but that seems like it should be unnecessary if the FreeBSD folks have decided to omit it from 7.0.

You are mixing things.

I'm talking about x11-drivers/xf86-video-intel and x11-drivers/xf86-video-i810 from FreeBSD ports.

The site you have mentioned is obsolete, you should visit www.freshports.org instead. Drivers for Xorg are maintained by Xorg developers and are not OS specific (they work on FreeBSD, Linux, OpenBSD) in general sense. Of course if somewhere linuxism happens, *BSD folks will fix things in their ports.

Kernel modules which are required for direct rendering are another story.

FreeBSD have accelerated rendering for many intel chips via i915.ko LKM and code from HEAD aka CURRENT is in sync with linux development on that field.

OpenBSD recently got experimental support for direct rendering (in general), ignoring toys for older OpenBSD and 3dfx chips.

NetBSD currently AFAIK do not care for DRI.