X.Org 7.7 Goes Into FreeBSD, KMS Is Ready

While X.Org 7.7 was only released last week, this updated set of X packages have already worked their way into FreeBSD. The FreeBSD developers request your help in testing.

Last week following the X.Org 7.7 Katamari release there was a call-for-testing issued on the freebsd-x11 mailing list.

That message about X.Org in FreeBSD goes on to detail how right now FreeBSD has "poor graphic card support." Additionally, they're trying to figure out what to do about Mesa 8.0 since it dropped support for a lot of the obscure and vintage graphics hardware. "This means users with new hardware will have to compile everything by themselves. Though I'm totally fine with compiling, not everyone has the CPU power to compile everything. What I'm trying to say is, I would love to see the newer xorg released as the default version, but i know this will break a lot of old hardware. The thing is, when we want to try to become a Modern Operating System, I dont see any other way to make the new xorg as default but to give Users the chance to compile the old xorg with a flag like WITH_OLD_XORG."

The message then goes on to explain that the Kernel Mode-Setting (KMS) support in FreeBSD has been completely migrated to FreeBSD 10. Not too far out the FreeBSD KMS support is also expected to be pushed to FreeBSD 9 Stable. Right now though this FreeBSD KMS support mostly comes down to a ported snapshot of Intel's driver code.