FreeBSD Gets A New X.Org With Intel KMS

The FreeBSD team working on X support have announced a set of X.Org updates to bring the FreeBSD package support to X.Org 7.5.2, which now includes Intel KMS support.

Announced on Sunday via a blog post was X.Org 7.5.2 for FreeBSD from their X.Org team. X.Org 7.5.2 for FreeBSD brings libdrm 2.4.31 (with KMS enabled), Mesa 7.11.2, X.Org Server 1.10.6, and a lot of new graphics drivers. The Mesa version and X.Org Server are outdated compared to what's available upstream and already found on most Linux desktops, but it's good nevertheless that they're finally hitting on Intel KMS support.

The FreeBSD team made a new WITH_NEW_XORG flag for the make.conf. The work hit cvs-ports on Saturday, per the mailing list confirmation.

While there is now Intel KMS support for FreeBSD in mainline, it will only work for FreeBSD 9 with the release engineering or stable branches or for FreeBSD 10 head users. Additionally, the Intel kernel mode-setting support is likely only working for older Intel hardware and Intel users will need to manually patch their sources with the new KMS kernel path to get the newer chips to work. There's also not any Radeon or Nouveau KMS in FreeBSD with this latest push.

Up until now, FreeBSD was shipping an old xf86-video-intel DDX that still handled user-space mode-setting (UMS), which has been dropped by upstream developers at Intel OTC for nearly three years. All new enable and support has been along the KMS paths and also requiring GEM (the Graphics Execution Manager) for in-kernel video memory management, which is also needed now for 3D acceleration. The other BSD distributions and Solaris (Oracle Solaris 11 finally got it last year) have been slow to adapt to these radical changes in the open-source Linux graphics stack.

FreeBSD KMS support has been a work-in-progress for a while after the FreeBSD Foundation began paying for porting Intel KMS.