[talk] Biannual BSD on Laptops Thread

[Scott Robbins]

On Sun, Apr 30, 2017 at 01:53:17PM -0400, Isaac (.ike) Levy wrote:
> On 04/24/17 13:59, Pete Wright wrote:
> > i've been running the freebsd drm-next branch on it and pretty much
> > everything just works:
> ...
> > this Dell laptop and the soon to be
> > incorporated updated DRM :^)
> 
> Thanks for all that Pete!
> 
> One question here, I'm not in the know on this drm-next branch, been
> searching around to grok what it's for, but that made me a bit more
> confused :)  (I found too much info, all of it assuming I know what the
> heck it is.)
> 
> Can you perhaps point me at some doc which explains what the drm-next
> branch is for, and how to get using it effectively?
> 

The documentation on it, like too much FreeBSD documentation these days,
seems to be all over the place and out of date.

As I might have mentioned in another email on this, I have only gotten it
working with CURRENT.  The steps that work for me are

git clone -b drm-next-4.7
https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics
cd freebsd-base-graphics
sudo make kernel KERNCONF=GENERIC-NODEBUG

Modified from out of date instructiosn here.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Use%20linuxkpi%20in%20DRM#Testing_Instructions_.2F_How_To

written for the older drm-next-3.9

In addition, I found that adding anything for i915 to /boot/loader.conf
made using the console excruciatingly slow.

I also found, in my case, (with a Yoga2 and Haswell 4000) that once I'd
gone into X, the only way out was to reboot.  That is, I can't close X
(regardless of desktop--alternating between openbox and dwm), nor go to a
console with ctl+alt+fX. 



-- 
Scott Robbins
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