Documentation for modern Intel graphics. Use default modesetting!

For some time I have seen great confusion as to the proper setup for Intel
graphics. This applies to Sandy Lake and newer, which goes back at least 12
years. I should note that I am not a graphics expert. I last worked in
graphics back in the mid-late 70s and base this on experience and advice
from others, primarily Jan Beich.

I'd love to see the handbook updated with modern information, but I lack
familiarity with writing FreeBSD documents.  Should I contact the doc
people about this and possibly provide text that will at least provide a
starting point?

The best website I have found to figure out how to best set up graphics is the
gentoo linux wiki. <https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Intel> It has many Linux
details such as installation, that are not applicable to FreeBSD, but the
issues of which software to use is clear. Note that our i915 driver
actually supports almost all Intel chips through Gen 12. (Not sure about
Alchemist. drm-61-kmod should work.) Support for Gen. 4 is fairly limited.

The big issue is that x11-drivers/xf86-video-intel is obsolete and has been
for Gen 4 and newer. Last I checked, Intel has the driver in maintenance
mode and only fixed bugs. New device capabilities in more modern devices
were ignored. This resulted in graphics that worked, but ran like a very
old device. I learned about this on my then new Sandy beach system. Playing
videos worked, but ate CPU. If I was using much CPU on anything else, the
video hesitated a lot. Jan pointed out that using the old Intel driver was
a bad idea.

By removing the Intel driver, the built-in modesetting driver takes over
and, in combination with Mesa and multimedia/libva-intel-media-driver,
provides very efficient CPU utilization graphics. It supports graphics
acceleration on all but Gen. 4. The gentoo wiki indicates that Mesa is a
part of the default software, but, last time I tried removing it, I lost
all acceleration. You might want to enable TearFree. It takes more GPU
power, but newer generations should handle it without problems. It may be
default in modesetting.

Since modesetting is built into X11 these days, it will automatically use
it as long as the Intel driver is not present.
-- 
Kevin Oberman, Part time kid herder and retired Network Engineer
E-mail: rkoberman@gmail.com
PGP Fingerprint: D03FB98AFA78E3B78C1694B318AB39EF1B055683