xf86-video-intel upgrade, anyone?

[Jan Henrik Sylvester]

On 01/-10/-28163 20:59, Pierre-Luc Drouin wrote:
> I have been told on another thread that FreeBSD does not support any recent
> laptop. NVidia switchable graphics is not supported, any recent ATI video
> cards are not supported and any graphic card that comes with i-series CPUs
> are not supported either. So we are basically in big trouble until this get
> fixed (hopefully this will happen very very soon, but I have no clue). The
> only solution right now is to use the Vesa driver, but this is pretty
> useless to get a new laptop and not being able to use its GPU...

That is not true. I have FreeBSD running on a Lenovo Thinkpad T510 with 
Nvidia graphics (8.2-RC1/amd64). Most of it works.

Switchable graphics is of course not working at all, same goes for the 
Intel processor graphics alone with non-vesa, but setting the graphics 
in BIOS to Nvidia only, it runs very well with the proprietary Nvidia 
driver. For a few month (since Nvidia 256.53), graphics works even after 
resuming from suspend. I dislike the "proprietary" on principle and the 
need for the weird nvidia-settings in particular, but it works.

The rest of this mail is unrelated to graphics in case anyone is 
interested in that particular notebook.

Except for Firewire, which prints out a string of errors about the 
hardware physically disappearing, all the hardware seems to work after 
resume from suspend -- I have never had that with FreeBSD before.

In contrast to my earlier reports on freebsd-mobile, besides 
supend/resume the build-in microphone is now working, too, if I stick to 
the build-in speakers at the same time (more complex HDA setups probably 
would take me some time). Remaining problems: Sound over DisplayPort 
still does not work at all, the build-in UMTS (Gobi 2000) does not work 
due to the firmware loader not being available for FreeBSD, and the 
build-in SD slot is slower than the one of my Eee PC.

For my previous laptops, I have always replaced the build-in wlan with 
an ath based card. The iwn device of the T510 works better than any 
other wlan device I have used before (ipw, iwi, wpi, iwn, ral, ath, 
ural, rum, zyd): It never goes down by itself and is back few seconds 
after resume from suspend.

It took some tweaking in the beginning, but some has become obsolete 
with 8.1-RELEASE (or 8-STABLE a few weeks after 8.1-RELEASE).

The fan is quiet enough for me on idle and still acceptable on high 
graphics+CPU load. (This is a huge contrast to a consumer line Dell 
notebook I tried a little over a year ago, which was much louder on idle 
than the Thinkpad on high load on FreeBSD, while the idle state was 
better on Windows: Most likely broken ACPI by Dell.)

Of course, due to not being able to switch to the Intel graphics, some 
hardware drawing more power than necessary unused with just the module 
loaded for convenience, FreeBSD 8 not having a "tickless" kernel, and so 
on, the battery does not last as long as it would be possible from the 
hardware alone. With a nine cells battery, it is long enough for my needs.

Overall, this recent laptop is the best FreeBSD on Laptop experience I 
have had so far (compared to a 2003 Acer, 2007 Lenovo, 2008 Asus 
Netbook, and the late 2009 Dell that I returned due to the noise).

Unrelated to FreeBSD: The bright, non-glare, 1920x1080 display is also 
great and I am slowly getting used to the 16x9 aspect ratio. The display 
had to be repaired once, though, and the mainboard died for an earlier 
T510 -- overall, 5 of about 30 T410/T510/X201(T) we bought here in 2010 
already had to be repaired in some way, which is supposed to be an 
unusual high rate for Lenovo according to the retailer.

Cheers,
Jan Henrik