X.org on skylake cpu

arnab

arnab

Hello FreeBSD community,
I am planning to buy a laptop with Skylake cpu (i7 6700HQ/i7 6500U). But I'm not sure that how it will be the graphics performance and support for Xorg as this page https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics says that there is no support for Intel Skylake graphics right now. So my question is how can I enable Xorg to run my desired desktop environment or doing day to day tasks like watching movies or image editing?
 
You can run Xorg using the vesa(4) or possibly scfb(4) but there will be no 2D or 3D acceleration. So it'll be relatively slow.
 
It'll work just fine, screen redraws are a little slow but it'll work. Skylake support is being worked on as we speak. No idea about the time-frame though.
 
Thank you SirDice. Though everyone has his/her own choice but I'm asking it from my interest that what kind of laptop does the Freebsd developers use or recommend?
 
arnab said:
But can I use it as a day to day desktop? Any will there be any support for Skylake graphics in near future?
Click to expand...

I'm using a skylake i7 system with modesetting driver as my daily workhorse (TrueOS; -> FreeBSD 12-CURRENT with DRM next). Even playing fullscreen video from the browser on youtube or safaribooks works fine, although fade in/out of overlays is a bit sluggish and cpu load on youtube is a bit high, but their codec has been steadily getting worse and worse on CPU load and video quality over the last years, so i'd not consider youtube as a 'benchmark'.

Skylake graphics support is already in place for i915 in DRM-next, but not enabled by default on TrueOS as it still contains bugs and relatively often causes the kernel to panic. Although given the improvements over the last few months since it's been initially implemented, i'd suspect it's not that far from being ready for daily use.
 
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