Francois Tigeot has updated the i915 drivers in DragonFly (remember the call for testing) to match what’s in Linux 3.10, which means you should get excellent accelerated video performance on most any recent Intel video chipset, on DragonFly.
9 Replies to “More i915 upgrades”
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I love BSD, but why sync next to a two year old Linux version?
Francois Tigeot has been rolling forward (at good speed) through Linux DRM code in order, so this is an upgrade from the equivalent of an older version of Linux, and then older before that. I’m sure the upgrades will continue forward – and now it matches existing Linux work, so that it can be easily ported, rather than redone.
DragonFly might have the most up-to-date i915 support of any BSD at this point; I haven’t actually tested that point, but this certainly ain’t shabby.
What about Radeons?
Yes, and nouveau would be nice too. Also an new/updated console driver, would be nice, so you could switch back to the console from X.
When I used pc-bsd version 9,x on an 8GB Asus i5 sandybridge laptop the intel support was dodgey at best – power usage was completely unacceptable, not to mention 90+ degree temperatures when compiling large programs – like Firefox.
I had windows 7 and ubuntu linux on the same laptop and it was easy to do -simple- battery life comparisons between pc-bsd and linux.
Linux and win7 results were similar with win 7 showing the best performance and battery life.
Support is supposed to be better with more recent versions of Freebsd and information about tuning C states on freebsd is now online.
That said, I don’t think freebsd is doing anyhing close to an acceptable job of X support – on the client side for Intel.
Nvidia is a totally different story and were I intent of using freebsd on a new laptop I would ignore any laptop which did not have an nvidia GPU.
I am no longer intent on using freebsd.
Has anyone done battery life comparisons between Dragonfly and linux/windows?
Thanks.
I agree with Colby. Intel users suffer with X. It’s a pain. I tried everything to get FreeBSD to play nice. No joy. Plus with vt, everything just freezes when switching from X to the virtual consoles. I hope dragonfly handles Intel support better. Still configuring
For what it’s worth, my experience with a i915 laptop (Chromebook) and DragonFly has been good so far. Video’s accelerated, works well. Battery life isn’t great because DragonFly doesn’t have a lot of laptop-specific ways to reduce power usage, though I haven’t tried anything with C-states at all.
The one annoyance is that the screen goes blank and stays blank if you drop out of X back to a terminal. It’s still responsive, though, so you can type ‘shutdown -r now’ or similar if you’re in that state.
Is there any fix for the freeze problem??? When I switch between X and VT the display get black and my laptop does nothing….
I hope anybody can help me to fix it…
lukesky333: it’s not frozen. The Intel chipset can’t be switched from accelerated rendering back into terminal mode. You can actually still type commands.
ivadaz on IRC had a patch for it, but I don’t know if it’s been incorporated in yet – if it has, it’s in -master. You can update and try dragonfly-master to see. Or, don’t switch terminals while in X.