DragonFlyBSD Moves Ahead With Updating Their Radeon DRM Graphics Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: DragonFlyBSD Moves Ahead With Updating Their Radeon DRM Graphics Driver

Besides DragonFlyBSD's Intel graphics support moving forward with porting of i915 DRM code from newer versions of the Linux kernel over to the DragonFlyBSD kernel, there's also been new activity on the Radeon front...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=DragonFlyBSD-Radeon-DRM

[M@yeulC]

Would it be possible to port amdgpu over to BSD? Are there a lot of kernel features missing? This would allow the catalyst blob to work on BSD systems, if they aren't doing anything esoteric with userspace interfaces, as far as I know.

[oleid]

Would it be possible to port amdgpu over to BSD? Are there a lot of kernel features missing? This would allow the catalyst blob to work on BSD systems, if they aren't doing anything esoteric with userspace interfaces, as far as I know.

AFAIK there is no mayor difference between radeon and amdgpu, so I don't see why not...

[agd5f]

There's nothing fundamentally different about amdgpu compared to radeon that would make porting it any harder.

[BSDude]

Would it be possible to port amdgpu over to BSD? Are there a lot of kernel features missing? This would allow the catalyst blob to work on BSD systems, if they aren't doing anything esoteric with userspace interfaces, as far as I know.

This was probably one of the reasons why AMD went with the userspace catalyst, as to make it portable to other OS without having to devote resources to support it. If open source projects can port over the DRM Radeon infrastructure then it would be trivial to install catalyst.

[enjolras]

Good luck convincing AMD to ship a binary fro DragonFly

[smitty3268]

Good luck convincing AMD to ship a binary fro DragonFly

I think the point was that you could take the linux binary and run it on DragonFly.

I don't know if that would work in practice, but it probably wouldn't be that big of a problem to work around if someone wanted to try it.

[enjolras]

You cannot do that. Posix is just an API, not an ABI. The linux ABI is not the same as the DragonFly ABI.
*BSD usually implements an emulation layer for the linux ABI, but it is not a priority in the dfly project (because it is time consuming and people usually have other priorities), and the inherited layer only supports linux 32bits. Freebsd recently gained a much better x86_64 linux emulation layer, and it might work with that.

[smitty3268]

You cannot do that. Posix is just an API, not an ABI. The linux ABI is not the same as the DragonFly ABI.
*BSD usually implements an emulation layer for the linux ABI, but it is not a priority in the dfly project (because it is time consuming and people usually have other priorities), and the inherited layer only supports linux 32bits. Freebsd recently gained a much better x86_64 linux emulation layer, and it might work with that.

My understanding is that the binary drivers are extremely self-contained and mostly just talk to the kernel and X, with everything else statically compiled in.

So my thought was that even a half-baked emulation layer might be very successful at running it, but like i said I don't know any of the details involved in that sort of thing.

[extraymond]

There's nothing fundamentally different about amdgpu compared to radeon that would make porting it any harder.

Does this mean we might have amdgpu supporting more than C.I?