AMD Catalyst Might Be Coming To FreeBSD
A Phoronix reader pointed out this forums.amd.com thread in which an AMD customer claims [email protected] confirmed that Catalyst is coming to FreeBSD with the Catalyst driver in-development.
I haven't heard any other confirmation of Catalyst coming to FreeBSD (the open-source Radeon DRM driver was ported to FreeBSD, not Catalyst). FreeBSD 10 brought the Radeon DRM driver that was ported from the Linux kernel by independent developers and this driver has since made its way to DragonFlyBSD, etc. However, the Radeon DRM on the BSD kernel remains many kernel releases out-of-date (~10 major kernel releases?) compared to the upstream Git code.
I wouldn't entirely rule out Catalyst officially coming to FreeBSD though with the new AMD Linux driver architecture where they plan to have a common DRM driver (the yet to be released new "AMDGPU" DRM driver) used by both the open and closed-source drivers while Catalyst will be bound to being a binary blob in user-space. It's possible that this blob could be ported to FreeBSD, once the AMDGPU kernel driver makes it to FreeBSD... Though I really wouldn't count on AMD developers porting the AMDGPU DRM driver initially to FreeBSD, given that their limited open-source Linux staff already has their hands full maintaining the Linux support.
We'll see in the months ahead if AMD decides to officially support FreeBSD, but for now the undisputed best graphics hardware support on *BSDs is with NVIDIA hardware where there's the binary driver that's maintained and updated in-step with the NVIDIA Linux/Solaris drivers.
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