Have you tried installing x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati yet? My configuration doesn't work without it.After a tour of the other BSDs on the machine in question with very mixed results, I changed my mind and decided to revisit this. I've found a workaround that seems to be reliable. I have no idea why it works, but so far, so good (perhaps like the old joke about the guy passing the 50th floor after jumping off the Empire State Building).
Using kld_list in /etc/rc.conf does not work. If you attempt to load radeonkms there, the system will crash when booting. The suggestion (by one of the contributors to this thread) to use "drm" instead of "radeonkms" in kld_list also does not work in my case. The system does not crash, but you get VGA resolution when X is started.
Prior to starting X, logging in as root and doing 'kldload radeonkms' seems to work reliably. I can then log in as myself, startx, and the resolution is correct. So I arranged
for sudo to allow me to do this command without a password and tried adding 'sudo /sbin/kldload radeonkms' to my .xinitrc at the very beginning. This crashes the system after 'startx'. But, if I issue the kldload prior to startx and then do the startx (with the kldload command removed from .xinitrc), it seems to work, though I have very few samples at this point. So there seems to be some sort of timing dependency here.
As I observed earlier, this is really a mess. The documentation is inaccurate and getting the kernel module loaded seems to be fragile. I will try to compose a bug report about this.
Other than this problem, the system seems to work well on this machine, though again, I don't have a lot of data yet.
If so, what is the model number of your Radeon device? I have "CPU: AMD A6-6310 APU with AMD Radeon R4 Graphics" (according to
dmesg -a | grep -i radeon
), with xf86-video-ati installed, and kld_list="acpi_video", on FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE. Everything works just fine, with any of startx
, x11/sddm, or x11/lightdm having been used, tested, and proven for starting graphics, without using /boot/loader.conf or kldload
to load any kernel modesetting driver. Instead, X with xf86-video-ati does it automatically right after X starts.