DragonFlyBSD Now Has Working Support For Intel Whiskey Lake Graphics

The BSDs continue to lag behind Linux when it comes to the graphics driver support, but this time the Intel Whiskey Lake graphics should have been in long ago -- and believed to be -- but adding the PCI IDs were forgotten.

Back in December of 2020 was a syncing of the Intel graphics driver PCI IDs from Linux 5.8 into the DragonFlyBSD kernel at the time. It should have been a straight-forward update for expanding the support given the commonality of the Intel Gen9 graphics at the time and DragonFlyBSD routinely porting over code from Intel's i915 Linux kernel graphics driver. Last year's commit was intended to bring support for Coffee Lake, Amber Lake, Whiskey Lake, and Comet Lake graphics on Intel processors. Unfortunately, the Whiskey Lake PCI IDs didn't end up being added to the driver list at the time.

Now a year later it's been noticed and this commit from Christmas weekend adds in the three relevant Whiskey Lake PCI IDs to now ensure the graphics are working on this BSD operating system.

So should you be running DragonFlyBSD on laptops, the Intel Whiskey Lake graphics should finally be working with the very latest kernel code. Whiskey Lake launched in late 2018 as the Skylake-derived family for mobile processors after Kaby Lake R and prior to Comet Lake and Ice Lake.

Intel graphics driver activity for DragonFlyBSD has been very light in recent times given the hurdles involved and the continuous catch-up game against the upstream Linux kernel. Though in the DRM space for DragonFlyBSD, last month did see AMDGPU added to DragonFlyBSD at long last.