Dear All,
As soon as my uni work is finished at the beginning of September, I am planning on giving FreeBSD a good try out on my desktop system - I like a lot of the features like built in ZFS, and the ports tree seems really cool to me too. I'd also like to get involved with the development community - to improve my average C skills and give something back maybe. In keeping with this, I read in the 2016 Q2 status report that GCN 1.0 hardware is now supported by the radeon drm/kms driver - would I be right in thinking this will be part of FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE when it comes out, and it is part of the current Betas?
Also, I have recently come across the drm-next-4.6 branch on github, which contains even more advanced work on bringing the linuxkpi layer up to scratch and importing the main drm/kms drivers from Linux 4.6 - would I be right in thinking that it would be necessary to replace one's whole base system (i.e. make buildworld and make buildkernel on this branch) in order to utilise this work, or would just building the kernel from this branch suffice? I have an interest in having workable 3D acceleration, as my uni project was a Sony PlayStation emulator which I have written from scratch using Java and JOGL and targetting OpenGL 4.x - I have it working now but a lot more work is required to get it up to playable speeds, and I'd love to do this work whilst getting to grips with FreeBSD too - and who knows, maybe even make a port of it
Sorry if these seem like silly questions, but I'm still rather new to FreeBSD after quite a long Linux background. I must say, after Linux from Scratch, and having to manually build mesa-git etc. on Fedora before GL4 packages were available for my radeon hd 7850, I am very impressed by the simplicity and elegance of a clearly separate base system - it seems to make a lot of sense to me. Any info on the above would be much appreciated, many thanks.
Regards,
Phil
As soon as my uni work is finished at the beginning of September, I am planning on giving FreeBSD a good try out on my desktop system - I like a lot of the features like built in ZFS, and the ports tree seems really cool to me too. I'd also like to get involved with the development community - to improve my average C skills and give something back maybe. In keeping with this, I read in the 2016 Q2 status report that GCN 1.0 hardware is now supported by the radeon drm/kms driver - would I be right in thinking this will be part of FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE when it comes out, and it is part of the current Betas?
Also, I have recently come across the drm-next-4.6 branch on github, which contains even more advanced work on bringing the linuxkpi layer up to scratch and importing the main drm/kms drivers from Linux 4.6 - would I be right in thinking that it would be necessary to replace one's whole base system (i.e. make buildworld and make buildkernel on this branch) in order to utilise this work, or would just building the kernel from this branch suffice? I have an interest in having workable 3D acceleration, as my uni project was a Sony PlayStation emulator which I have written from scratch using Java and JOGL and targetting OpenGL 4.x - I have it working now but a lot more work is required to get it up to playable speeds, and I'd love to do this work whilst getting to grips with FreeBSD too - and who knows, maybe even make a port of it
Sorry if these seem like silly questions, but I'm still rather new to FreeBSD after quite a long Linux background. I must say, after Linux from Scratch, and having to manually build mesa-git etc. on Fedora before GL4 packages were available for my radeon hd 7850, I am very impressed by the simplicity and elegance of a clearly separate base system - it seems to make a lot of sense to me. Any info on the above would be much appreciated, many thanks.
Regards,
Phil
