FreeBSD support for Intel Atom Z3735 and Z8300 tablets – GPU, audio, Wi-Fi and touchscreen compatibility

L

LostNebula

Hello everyone,
I have a couple of small Windows tablets based on Intel Atom processors, and I am interested in installing FreeBSD on them. Before attempting the installation, I would like to find out how well FreeBSD currently supports the hardware in these devices.
The two platforms I am particularly interested in are:
Intel Atom Z3735 – tablet with 1 GB RAM
Intel Atom Z8300 (Cherry Trail) – tablet with 2 GB RAM
I would especially like to know about the following hardware components:
GPU / graphics acceleration – Intel HD Graphics support, including DRM/KMS, hardware acceleration and usable desktop performance
Audio – Intel SST / I2S audio and codecs such as Realtek/ES8316/ES8336
Wi-Fi – support for the wireless chipsets commonly found in these tablets
Bluetooth
Touchscreen and multitouch
Accelerometer / orientation sensor
eMMC storage
SD card reader
USB
Display and brightness control
Battery status and charging
Power management / suspend
Volume and hardware buttons
UEFI/EFI boot support, especially on tablets with 32-bit UEFI firmware
Any other Cherry Trail/Bay Trail-specific hardware that may require special configuration or patches
My main concern is whether these tablets can provide a reasonably complete FreeBSD experience, rather than simply being able to boot FreeBSD.
For example, if the GPU works only with basic framebuffer output and has no proper acceleration, or if Wi-Fi/audio/touchscreen require unsupported drivers, that would be important for me to know before installing it.
I would therefore appreciate any detailed information about the current FreeBSD hardware support for Bay Trail (Z3735) and Cherry Trail (Z8300), including which components are fully supported, partially supported, unsupported, or require manual configuration.
If there are specific FreeBSD versions, kernel options, drivers, patches, or configuration files that work particularly well with these Atom tablets, I would also be very interested in hearing about them.
If the hardware support is sufficiently good, I would like to install FreeBSD on these tablets and experiment with using them as lightweight FreeBSD systems.
Thank you in advance for any information, especially from anyone who has already run FreeBSD on Intel Atom Z3735/Z8300 tablets.
 
LostNebula said:
Intel Atom Z8300 (Cherry Trail) – tablet with 2 GB RAM
I would especially like to know about the following hardware components:
GPU / graphics acceleration – Intel HD Graphics support, including DRM/KMS, hardware acceleration and usable desktop performance
Click to expand...
SCFB only video driver after FreeBSD 13.5 EOL.
I am working on a Upboard X8350 this morning.
 
LostNebula said:
Damn, why is this operating system developing so slowly?
Click to expand...
On the other hand, why should the already thin and scarce pool of FreeBSD developers add support for hardware that has been EoL by Intel for a while and has several gotchas even on a comparable platform Intel more or less supports (Linux)?
You can try to add the support yourself, there are forum users that have achieved great - works on my machine - successes with LLMs on unsupported hardware.
 
I have a Z3735 device, an ASUS X205TA, which is basically a tablet in a laptop form. I have it working fully with Linux, but this is one of those devices that still require quite a bit of tweaking to get working. I have been unable to boot FreeBSD on this machine.

Manual tweaks necessary for: audio, keyboard, touchpad, audio (even after getting it to work I needed to mess with pipewire profiles), sd card, suspend/resume. Bluetooth is flaky. Just a lot of pain to get to a decent baseline.
 
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