Contributing to the kernel video drivers

[Jean-Sébastien Pédron]

On 29/12/2015 00:23, José Pérez wrote:
> I am worried by the lack of other kernel resources. For example power
> management relays on some linux functions we definitely do not have 
> here, so we shall decide if we take the linux approach and give
> FreeBSD kernel power management infrastructure, or we just pass and
> fake the missing pieces into drm_os_freebsd.[c|h]

This is something I didn't study. I discussed with Alex Deucher, one of
the maintainer of the Radeon driver, about reclocking in the Radeon
driver. He said that everything was contained in the driver itself. It
didn't depend on facilities provided by Linux. Beside that, I don't know
much.

>>> Am I the only one with the impression that FreeBSD is so way behind
>>> just because of this approach?
>>
>> Currently, we don't have a real method, we mainly lacked dedicated
>> maintainer(s). I'm the only one working on Radeon and took on i915
>> recently. As I'm doing this on my spare time, progress is slow and we
>> have a lot to catch.
> 
> I think, Jean-Sébastien, this is the real reason why FreeBSD is behind,
> and I suggest we solve this problem not only for the time being, but also
> for the future.

Exactly, that's the purpose of this thread: bring more people in! :)

> As you have a crystal clear understanding of how things work behind the
> scenes in FreeBSD + graphic support, can I suggest you enable others to
> do the job? We shall go multi core. Would you be available for questions,
> doubts and the like, maybe on irc or similar live channel?

For the coming days, this mailing-list is fine, because I won't have
much time on IRC. Plus, it's archived. But feel free to join
#freebsd-xorg on EFnet whenever you want! I will be happy to discuss if
I can.

To experiment with working as a team on the kernel video drivers, I
would love to receive some help to debug the drm-i915-update-38 branch.
Some users get regressions compared to HEAD: I really want those to be
fixed so I can commit the branch to HEAD and move forward with the next
update. At this point, I don't really care about Haswell stability:
important bug fixes are in Linux 3.9, thus we should update DRM again
quickly instead of spending time to debug something which could be fixed
already.

Thank you for showing interest!

-- 
Jean-Sébastien Pédron

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