Intel Arc Graphics problem (Thinkpad E14)

J

JohnnyThunders

Hi all
I'm a long time lurker and recently I installed FreeBSD on my Lenovo Thinkpad E14 (2025) to use it as a daily driver and get more knowledge about the system.

I followed the handbook for installing the graphics driver for Intel and it worked well until I rebooted. The usual booting screen appeared where all the information gets displayed in the terminal but it was laggy and stopped displaying the lines of text after a while. I then switched to the generic scfb driver which works fine so far but it lacks features like HDMI support for instance.

Is this a common problem and is thwmere a solution for it so far? I can send more information about my hardware if needed.

Thank you all in advance!
 
JohnnyThunders assuming your cpu is an Arrow Lake, it should work with the following:
  • FreeBSD 15.1+
  • drm-612-kmod (# pkg install drm-612-kmod && sysrc kld_list+="i915kms") [If there is no package, you will have to install from ports, it's on graphics/drm-612-kmod]
  • gpu-firmware-intel-kmod (# pkg install gpu-firmware-kmod , you can then remove the packages that don't match your gpu if you want, for example # pkg remove -g gpu-firmware-amd-* && pkg remove -g gpu-firmware-radeon-*)
  • X11 modesetting only (i.e. do not use the x11 intel device configuration, as in, don't create the /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf configuration that is on the handbook)
  • Wayland, works, but please note that there are several issues with SDDM (so use another login manager if you want to use one)
On the other hand if it's a Lunar Lake there's no support at the moment (i.e. it depends on the xe kernel driver which isn't ported yet).
 
In April of 2026, I actually tried installing FreeBSD on an Ideapad because it had Intel ARC graphics and an Intel-branded wifi card. I ended up looking at a lot of ACPI errors, and after a bit of troubleshooting, came to the conclusion that very recent Intel hardware does not yet have FreeBSD-based drivers/firmware.

Surprisingly, AMD stuff of same age - it's very well supported under FreeBSD, I'm typing this on an Ideapad 5 with a Ryzen AI 7 445 (2026), and it works very well, I'm using it as my daily driver. The amdgpu driver (from DRM 6.12) was not very well cooked back in April, so I have to use the SCFB driver. And, I installed 15.0-RELEASE. By now, I'm planning to move into 15.1-RELEASE, which does support the DRM 6.12 stuff.
 
fahrenheit said:
JohnnyThunders assuming your cpu is an Arrow Lake, it should work with the following:
  • FreeBSD 15.1+
  • drm-612-kmod (# pkg install drm-612-kmod && sysrc kld_list+="i915kms") [If there is no package, you will have to install from ports, it's on graphics/drm-612-kmod]
  • gpu-firmware-intel-kmod (# pkg install gpu-firmware-kmod , you can then remove the packages that don't match your gpu if you want, for example # pkg remove -g gpu-firmware-amd-* && pkg remove -g gpu-firmware-radeon-*)
  • X11 modesetting only (i.e. do not use the x11 intel device configuration, as in, don't create the /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf configuration that is on the handbook)
  • Wayland, works, but please note that there are several issues with SDDM (so use another login manager if you want to use one)
On the other hand if it's a Lunar Lake there's no support at the moment (i.e. it depends on the xe kernel driver which isn't ported yet).
Click to expand...
Thanks a lot fahrenheit, I followed your steps and it works like a charm now. I also remove the other gpu packages as you suggested.
 
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