Between DFly, OS108, OpenBSD and AMD, NVidia graphics

hd_scania

FreeBSD and Linux distroes are known for well functioning on the most graphics
Also, Illumos distroes are well known for not functioning on AMD Radeon or Ryzen APU
OpenBSD are finally known for not funcitoning on NVidia graphics for missing Nouveau, the NVidia’s libre driver present on Linux and OS108/NetBSD

How about OS108/NetBSD and OpenBSD on AMD Radeon and Ryzen APU?
And how are the statuses of DFly on AMD Radeon, AMD Ryzen APU, and NVidia?
Will DFly and OS108/NetBSD also be well functioning on any graphics, just like on FreeBSD and Linux distroes?😊

bsduck

DragonFly cannot do much with Nvidia cards, just like OpenBSD it has neither nouveau nor the proprietary driver. AMD is said to be well supported (at some time it was better at supporting AMD than FreeBSD was), but I don't have any recent AMD hardware to confirm.

daftaupe

bsduck there is no admgpu driver working yet on DragonFlyBSD so no support for recent AMD cards but it's being worked on. There's the radeon driver for older cards.

I was able to use Xorg with a Ryzen 3 2200G on DragonFlyBSD with the xf86-video-scfb driver that uses the framebuffer. But it has limitations such as the inability to use multiple screens for example, but it's enough for example to have an i3 setup and browse the Web or work on some graphics applications.

Needless to say that this integrated GPU works much better on FreeBSD which provides the amdgpu driver. I was able to run a Wayland-only setup on it, with sway compositor. It works really great. I have 2 minor issues with it :

turning the screen off kills Firefox if it's focused (no problem if it's on another desktop)
I couldn't make use of DisplayPort Multi Stream Transport Mode properly as when I turn off the screens they change their numbering (DP-1 -> DP-3 for example), breaking the configuration . So now I have one screen plugged on DP and the other one on the HDMI output, and that works

nia

https://wiki.netbsd.org/laptops/

chrisfromgreece

nia Amd Graphics GCNv1 ?? Doesn't seem to support most of the hardware not to even mention new hardware not even old ones

hd_scania

So that for OS108 and NetBSD, both AMD and NVidia graphics will likely work seamlessly?
On NetBSD NVidia cards will be dependent on Nouveau

nia

hd_scania No, you need to be careful about the generation of the GPU, there's a reason it's mentioned. GCN was introduced in 2012, Maxwell was introduced in 2014. Kaby Lake was introduced in 2016. The support for Intel cards is far newer. The support for AMD and Nvidia cards means you will be definitely using second-hand hardware.

chrisfromgreece

hd_scania NetBSD will not work with any amd graphics except you have some ancient amd like r7 this may work with radeon driver netbsd i not compatible openbsd is more compatible it supports all amd and intel gpus and only old nvidia but it has very little packages available and performance is the worst of all i like openbsd but FreeBSD and Dragonflybsd is by far the best choices if you don't want to use FreeBSD 13 which very compatible and fast you can use DragonFlyBSD as an alternative from what i know you will not have any problems with amd gpus if you don't boot with efi . If you boot with efi you will get an error message about framebuffer !
While on freebsd 12 (stable) there is a workarround with hw.syscons.disable=1
on DragonFlyBSD that switch won't do anything !
NetBSD supports very well Nvidia graphics cards if you have an Nvidia gpu it will probably support it.
DragonFlyBSD also has the advantage that is very fast and also you can select the mirror for your country and have super crazy pkg download speeds !!

hd_scania

nia So that for unused laptops or workstations with GCN (AMD) and Maxwell (NVidia) cards, what issues are expected on OS108 and NetBSD?

bsduck

I tried to put NetBSD 9.1 on a somewhat old (2010) laptop with Nvidia GT320M. The result was disappointing, graphical performance was really poor, while nouveau works well with Linux* on the same hardware. It may be the same driver but it seems the NetBSD implementation is not at par with the original yet.

*newer Linuxes also have troubles (of a different kind) which seem to come from the kernel itself

With Nvidia hardware I would definitely stick with FreeBSD or Linux as of now. You can try Illumos but in my opinion this OS is terrible for desktop usecases (I assume we are not talking about servers), it is slow, heavy on ressources and has little software available.

hd_scania

bsduck I always mean graphics, so we’re unlikely even mentioning servers
I’ve tried to test Illumos on some AMD graphics laptops, but no luck, those cards needs nonfree firmware missing there, although there aren’t any nonfree drivers
My upcoming laptop is with NVidia, hopes Illumos to have done an installaion, regardless how slow it is

JuvenalUrbino

chrisfromgreece remember commas are a thing! 😜