cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Archives Discussions

stacepellegrino
Journeyman III

Is there FreeBSD driver support for Radeon R9 290X card?

To all those concerned,


I have read that FreeBSD would be supported by the latest graphic card drivers, which was also confirmed by tech.support@amd.com.

I am posting here as recommended by tech.support@amd.com from my original posting here... AMD Support and Game Forums - FreeBSD driver support for Radeon R9 290X

Any further information on this (e.g. download URL for beta driver in development) would be much appreciated.

Regards,

-stacepellegrino

0 Likes
1 Solution

Correct - we maintain a BSD-licensed open source graphics stack which then gets ported to a number of different OSes including FreeBSD. FreeBSD graphics support lagged behind Linux for a while during the transition from User ModeSetting (UMS) to Kernel ModeSetting (KMS) and addition of the TTM memory manager, but now seems to be pretty much caught up.

For the R9 290x I believe two issues were open - picking up a sufficiently new X server to include the glamor 2D acceleration method, and picking up a sufficiently new Mesa driver to include HW support for Hawaii (the chip in R9 290x). Looks like X server 1.17 is running now, so once a newer Mesa version is available in FreeBSD the R9 290x should be supported.

View solution in original post

0 Likes
4 Replies
jtrudeau
Staff

Let me see what I can find out.

0 Likes
jtrudeau
Staff

Sorry this took a little while....

As best I can tell, AMD does not formally test/implement FreeBSD support. Since FreeBSD is an open source project, you can check within that community to see what they've got for graphics/GPU support. I did find these links that might be a good starting place.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics

AMD_GPU - FreeBSD Wiki

Hope this helps

Correct - we maintain a BSD-licensed open source graphics stack which then gets ported to a number of different OSes including FreeBSD. FreeBSD graphics support lagged behind Linux for a while during the transition from User ModeSetting (UMS) to Kernel ModeSetting (KMS) and addition of the TTM memory manager, but now seems to be pretty much caught up.

For the R9 290x I believe two issues were open - picking up a sufficiently new X server to include the glamor 2D acceleration method, and picking up a sufficiently new Mesa driver to include HW support for Hawaii (the chip in R9 290x). Looks like X server 1.17 is running now, so once a newer Mesa version is available in FreeBSD the R9 290x should be supported.

0 Likes

User "Avengence" pointed out on IRC that my answer above was missing something important - in addition to Mesa support the kernel code in FreeBSD (radeon driver plus drm framework) needs further updates to support R9 290X. Initial Hawaii support arrived in mid-2013 and went into the 3.11 kernel, but the FreeBSD code is currently at Linux 3.8 kernel level. Sorry about that.

0 Likes