DragonFlyBSD Updates Its Intel Graphics Driver From Linux 4.8.17

The Linux 4.8 series is over three years old while now the DragonFlyBSD crew has pulled in the Linux 4.8.17 sources of the Intel "i915" DRM driver into their kernel for providing updated graphics driver coverage.

For roughly two years the DragonFlyBSD kernel has been making use of modified Linux 4.7~4.8 kernel code for their Intel Direct Rendering Manager driver adaptation. With this update against the newer point release code, DragonFlyBSD desktop users with Intel graphics should be seeing better support.

In particular, this code push today to DragonFlyBSD Git master should yield better Broxton / Cherryview / Valleyview support, Gen8 / Gen9 graphics improvements, atomic mode-setting improvements, performance enhancements, and various other changes.

More details via this commit.

The Intel and Radeon DRM driver code in DragonFlyBSD and other BSDs tend to remain quite dated compared to the latest upstream Linux kernel DRM but at least progress is being made and better than years ago when there was no GPU driver support on the BSDs besides NVIDIA. For those using NVIDIA hardware with their proprietary driver, it tends to "just work" with similar features and performance to Linux.