Intel Haswell support - Any updates?

[David Chisnall]

On 17 Sep 2015, at 14:41, Lundberg, Johannes <johannes at brilliantservice.co.jp> wrote:
> 
> However, the problem now is not the driver right? But the whole graphics
> stack which has to be rewritten to work with new generation graphics like
> KMS, Wayland, etc?

There are lots of different components here that you’re conflating:

- KMS is the thing that allows the kernel to be responsible for setting the graphics mode, restoring it on context switches and so on.  This has worked on FreeBSD for a while.

- GEM / TTM are memory managers, they allow the kernel to manage memory (video memory and main memory allocated to the GPU) for GPU-using drivers.  These work on FreeBSD, but the supported version lags Linux slightly.  This is the focus of current work.

- The i915 driver.  This is the graphics driver for Intel GPUs.  It uses KMS and the memory manager functionality. Importing a newer version will be possible once the underlying parts are done.

- Wayland is a userland application that sits on top of DRI drivers, just as X.org does.  Most of the things Wayland needs that don’t work on FreeBSD are not graphics related.

The problem is that the developers *also* conflate them.  Upstream i915 developers will add KPIs to GEM / TTM / KMS to make their lives easier and these features need bringing across to FreeBSD.

David