Hello,
After the graphics card in my IBM Thinkpad T42 died, I am looking for a new Thinkpad. I can get an educational promotion on the Lenovo Thinkpad W500, so I have been looking around (unsuccessfully) for any experiences on running FreeBSD on these machines.
The problem is that I have always been using Compiz (with emerald and kiba-dock to launch applications) without any additional window manager, so if I want the same functionality, hardware accelleration will be crucial. The W500 has a dual graphics-setup with a switchable Intel GMA 4500MHD (for battery life) and an ATI Mobility FireGL V5700 (for performance). As the graphics card can be selected in the bios, I don't expect any problems with this dual setup - several posts can be found confirming that Xorg (on Ubuntu) can manage this as long as the switching is not handed over to the OS.
Now for accelleration on the FireGL V5700. Apparently this card is recognized as an "ati mobility radeon HD 3650" (source: http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/openbsd-misc/2009/3/9/5123904) I understand that because ATI doesn't release a custom FreeBSD driver, it are generally only the older cards that are fully supported on FBSD.
But I got a bit confused on which part is responsible for the hardware accelleration. I see that the radeonhd driver mentions "no 2D and 3D support", reflecting the incomplete support for newer cards. But the Mobility HD3650 isn't even mentioned in the (7.2-RELEASE) manual. Nor is it mentioned in the radeon manpage, but then there is this xorg.log that lists it while the radeon driver is loaded:
http://people.freebsd.org/~scf/Xorg.0.log
On the other hand, I know that a lot has been changing in Xorg over the past six months, and I found this recent drm source header actually mentioning the Mobility FireGL 5700:
http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/dev/drm/drm_pciids.h
Therefore the following questions:
- Is there any chance that I can use a recent FreeBSD version that supports the card sufficiently to have compiz running? Would this depend on the xorg driver or rather on drm?
(more tricky)
- If not currently supported, would it be a risk to buy the W500 anyway, and resort to an alternative (integrated Intel GPU, perhaps temporally running fluxbox) while full support for the ATI card is on its way?
Thanks!
After the graphics card in my IBM Thinkpad T42 died, I am looking for a new Thinkpad. I can get an educational promotion on the Lenovo Thinkpad W500, so I have been looking around (unsuccessfully) for any experiences on running FreeBSD on these machines.
The problem is that I have always been using Compiz (with emerald and kiba-dock to launch applications) without any additional window manager, so if I want the same functionality, hardware accelleration will be crucial. The W500 has a dual graphics-setup with a switchable Intel GMA 4500MHD (for battery life) and an ATI Mobility FireGL V5700 (for performance). As the graphics card can be selected in the bios, I don't expect any problems with this dual setup - several posts can be found confirming that Xorg (on Ubuntu) can manage this as long as the switching is not handed over to the OS.
Now for accelleration on the FireGL V5700. Apparently this card is recognized as an "ati mobility radeon HD 3650" (source: http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/openbsd-misc/2009/3/9/5123904) I understand that because ATI doesn't release a custom FreeBSD driver, it are generally only the older cards that are fully supported on FBSD.
But I got a bit confused on which part is responsible for the hardware accelleration. I see that the radeonhd driver mentions "no 2D and 3D support", reflecting the incomplete support for newer cards. But the Mobility HD3650 isn't even mentioned in the (7.2-RELEASE) manual. Nor is it mentioned in the radeon manpage, but then there is this xorg.log that lists it while the radeon driver is loaded:
http://people.freebsd.org/~scf/Xorg.0.log
On the other hand, I know that a lot has been changing in Xorg over the past six months, and I found this recent drm source header actually mentioning the Mobility FireGL 5700:
http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/dev/drm/drm_pciids.h
Therefore the following questions:
- Is there any chance that I can use a recent FreeBSD version that supports the card sufficiently to have compiz running? Would this depend on the xorg driver or rather on drm?
(more tricky)
- If not currently supported, would it be a risk to buy the W500 anyway, and resort to an alternative (integrated Intel GPU, perhaps temporally running fluxbox) while full support for the ATI card is on its way?
Thanks!