amd vega and radeon series vga card driver for FreeBSD 12.1 and 12.2 tutorial for beginner[update 2020-12-16]

[Vull]

I have AMD A6-6310 APU with AMD Radeon R4 Graphics, and UEFI booting. On 13.0-RELEASE all I need to do on first boot after install is pkg install drm-kmod xf86-video-ati and I can get MATE, plasma5-plasma, or even the whole kde5 meta-package running without rebooting.

I make no related changes to /boot/loader.conf or /etc/rc.conf. This is a completely different experience than a few years ago when, due to my own shortcomings no doubt, I was unable to get anything better than scfb graphics running on an AMD A9-9420 RADEON R5 CPU with 11.2-RELEASE or 12.0-RELEASE. Have to give 13.0-RELEASE most or all of the credit really, plus some really great advice gleaned from searching through related threads on this forum.

 

[astyle]

OK, all is clear now. The drm-kmod in ports/pkg in 12.2-RELEASE is working now. But only after I actually enable SDDM and therefore X starts by itself.

Without X being started, I get no output on my monitor. The problem becomes clear after reading the message from my Dell monitor (below).



So the kmod-v4.16 has problems setting the correct timings for my monitor in console mode (vt). But the git tree kmod-v5.0-fbsd12.1 fixes it. Because I was trying to get amdgpu working before I setup X and a WM/DE I did not notice that it actually works. So if I was using startx from a TTY, I would have a problem, because only after X starts can I see anything on my screen. For my use case, I will always have SDDM start up at boot, so it is OK. And actually I will be using my TV in production, so it may not have that timing issue anyway. I assume 13-RELEASE and beyond will just work fine in any case.

Thanks astyle for leading me to investigate further.

Yeah, once you do things in correct order, they do work. In programming terms, it's a bit comparable to the queue data structure.
Once you have stuff visible on a monitor, there's nothing to worry about, you can plug in the most expensive 80-inch TV you can find, via HDMI or even DisplayPort, and it will work just fine.