I just installed FreeBSD v13 on a 10-year-old machine with an AMD processor and Radeon gpu.
First of all, I'd like to mention that the documentation in the Handbook in the X configuration section on how to deal with KMS and the various available driver modules is simply incomprehensible, at least to me, and I have a *lot* of experience in OS development and Unix/Linux system administration.
But the problem I want to discuss is that after installing drm-kmod (using pkg install, not building the port, because that port does not build correctly, another issue; I will file a bug report on that one, as well as the primary issue I'm discussing here), the post-install comments printed by the package suggest adding KLD_LIST=radeonkms to /etc/rc.conf. If you follow that advice, the next time you try to reboot the system, it won't. The boot process hangs at about the point where you expect the switch to higher resolution text. I probably could have saved the situation with either the bootable installer system or a rescue system, and eliminated the KLD_LIST line from rc.conf, but my ZFS knowledge needs work (getting the right stuff mounted in order to access files in /etc , so I just re-installed.
With the re-installed system, before running 'startx', I manually ran 'kldload radeonkms'. That worked fine and resolution after startx is correct, which is not the case if radeonkms is not loaded.
So the question is how to load radeonkms at boot-time in a way that doesn't lead to disaster?
/Don Allen
First of all, I'd like to mention that the documentation in the Handbook in the X configuration section on how to deal with KMS and the various available driver modules is simply incomprehensible, at least to me, and I have a *lot* of experience in OS development and Unix/Linux system administration.
But the problem I want to discuss is that after installing drm-kmod (using pkg install, not building the port, because that port does not build correctly, another issue; I will file a bug report on that one, as well as the primary issue I'm discussing here), the post-install comments printed by the package suggest adding KLD_LIST=radeonkms to /etc/rc.conf. If you follow that advice, the next time you try to reboot the system, it won't. The boot process hangs at about the point where you expect the switch to higher resolution text. I probably could have saved the situation with either the bootable installer system or a rescue system, and eliminated the KLD_LIST line from rc.conf, but my ZFS knowledge needs work (getting the right stuff mounted in order to access files in /etc , so I just re-installed.
With the re-installed system, before running 'startx', I manually ran 'kldload radeonkms'. That worked fine and resolution after startx is correct, which is not the case if radeonkms is not loaded.
So the question is how to load radeonkms at boot-time in a way that doesn't lead to disaster?
/Don Allen