UPDATE: github branch available (2022-03-12)

You if have a laptop running one of the latest AMD Ryzen 5 (such as the ThinkPad T14 AMD) with integrated Radeon graphic on FreeBSD 13, you probably struggled to get the GPU running and finally gave up to use the generic scfb frame buffer device instead. It is non accelerated, you cannot access any external port nor adjust the brightness, but it’s usable.

Now I’ve some good news for you! After randomly searching the FreeBSD forums I found a post that was referring to a work-in-progress branch of drm-kmod that should support the latest AMD Renoir GPU. This branch is now named 5.5-stable. After some modifications I was able to compile it on FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE-p3 and got it to run on the GENERIC kernel.

Acceleration and the external ports work well. I even managed to get a 3 screen setup working through one of those USB-C docking station.

Only one cable connected to the laptop that carries the power supply, audio, external mouse, two screens, external HDD, floppy drive and more. Now, this is what I call “Universal Serial Bus”.

Patching the drm-kmod 5.5-stable branch to compile on 13.0-RELEASE was pretty straightforward too. A missing function here, a different signature there, some missing constants. A lot easier than other things I’ve been trying to port from 12 to 13.

Since I’ve also been able to install a modern TeX Live environment (the 2015 version from the port tree is getting rather outdated), I can now again use FreeBSD as my main working Operating System. Yahoo!