What does HackerNews think of drm-kmod?

drm driver for FreeBSD

Language: C

It's not Lenovo.

FreeBSD's unstable as of yet iwlwifi[1] driver can use T14-built-in intel AX200/201/210 card but there's still no 5GHz speeds achievable. Personally, I'm waiting for LinuxKPI[2] emulation to allow using Linux drivers for WiFi adapters, like it allows me to use Linux drm-kmod[3] driver for graphics acceleration in Xorg.

For now, there's only 802.11n and some very limited support for establishing 802.11ac connections but still not speeds higher than 2.4GHz.

[1] https://wiki.freebsd.org/WiFi/Iwlwifi

[2] https://wiki.freebsd.org/LinuxKPI

[3] https://github.com/freebsd/drm-kmod

> Graphics - you're limited to Nvidia and whatever Linux 5.4 supported.

There's full Xorg GPU acceleration on AMD cards with drm-kmod[1]

> Wi-Fi - 802.11g is as fast as you can go without wifibox.

Some 5GHz 80211n cards will work. There's no support for ac/ax but at least you're not limited to overcrowded 2.4GHz.

[1] https://github.com/freebsd/drm-kmod

Thanks for the very detailed response!

I'm using the "stock" x11-drivers/xf86-video-amdgpu from ports, currently 19.1.0_2. It's a smooth ride on FreeBSD 13.1-STABLE since 5.5-wip branch of https://github.com/freebsd/drm-kmod (I haven't yet tested 5.10-lts you mentioned).

I remember vaguely that something had to be compiled against kernel sources; most likely drm-kmod.

> Those were fixed pretty recently and not released yet, i.e. you have to manually apply a patch, compile and install.

If you're on FreeBSD RELEASE, the "STABLE" branch is a little more cutting edge. I'm using amdgpu Xorg acceleration with it for close to a year now.

> With all these updates I'm pretty much happy with FreeBSD right now.

Give me modern WiFi and I'll be, too! That's the only piece missing from a fully functional FreeBSD laptop. 2.4GHz is hell in urban areas.