intro

[Tom Rushworth]

Hi All,

A few quick words to say where I'm coming from:

I'm a long time C programmer, mostly userland, but I have done some 
kernel work.  I was doing Linux USB drivers in the early 2000's, and I 
tinkered with the NetBSD serial driver way back when serial ports were 
actually useful.  I wrote my first serious C program in the late 1970s.

I'm a FreeBSD desktop user, driven out of MacOS by the marketroids, and 
driven out of Linux by systemd :).

I recently purchased a new desktop machine that turns out to have an 
Intel Iris Pro P6300 (Broadwell GT3e) graphics system.  It came with 
Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon, which manages the screen very nicely, so the 
Linux driver is good enough.  I ran into issues with ssh within hours of 
starting up, and I'm just not interested in digging through yet another 
(foolish) system administration issue involving systemd to sort it out.

I tried FreeBSD 11.1, but the i915 driver there isn't quite up to the 
job.  I've looked at the various FreeBSD i915 websites and discussions, 
but can't easily sort out where the current focus is.

What I'd like from the list is advice on where to start :).  I'm willing 
to test pre-built stuff, or build it myself, or even work on the code, 
but everything I looked at seemed to have ground to a halt about a year ago.

So, where to begin?

Regards,

-- 
Tom Rushworth