In a previous post, I explained that I backported the 5.5-stable branch of drm-kmod and got it running on FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE although some bugs persisted.

Since then I’ve received several requests if it was possible to access the code or if a port was available. However the answer was always that it was a quick and dirty patch, panic do occur and that it wasn’t published on purpose (but a tarball was available).

But I’ve been at it again. I first tried to backport the 5.7-stable branch to FreeBSD 13. It did compile and display worked. But there were several bugs that I was unable to fix.

So I restarted the patch over 5.5-stable but this time dedicated more than 10 minutes for the task. The thing works and even fixed a bug in the process. Also it does now compile on a fresh FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE ✌️

This new version is available on my github as 5.5-fbsd13release branch. Feel free to clone and try. Intel i915 is still not supported but could be if someone is interested and willing to try it.

Still no port tho, as I’m not confident at all in my understanding of drm-kmod and ability to contribute.

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!