5.6 GPU drivers update

nia

Just a heads up since a lot of the NetBSD desktop users seem to be here...

Riastradh and Maya have been syncing our graphics drivers with the DRM/KMS stack in Linux 5.6. This will bring support for a large amount of newer hardware, as well as support for GLAMOR, a new acceleration mode in the X Window System. The newer shims for Linux kernel interfaces should also make future GPU driver updates much easier, resulting in less of a lag before newer GPUs are supported in NetBSD.

The new drivers are now running semi-successfully on several developer's machines, but more testing is always appreciated (in particular, crash reports).

~~~ If you're interested in testing the new code, clone the repository from Riastradh's GitHub and build a kernel (remember to back up the known-working one):~~

Just track -current since the branch was merged. Please report any bugs the standard way, not in this thread.

The modesetting driver must be used currently.
This can be specified in /etc/xorg.conf:

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "Card0"
	Driver      "modesetting"
EndSection

oui

nia Super stoked for this, kudos to all involved!

Jay

nia Awesome 🙂

Bruno

What's the status of amdgpu?

nia

Bruno Same as everything else, experimental, being worked on

tcmart14

I've been seeing graphics drivers brought up a lot on r/BSD, maybe we could get a write up over there. Seems like some people over there might be willing to install NetBSD and do some testing.

nia

tcmart14 I asked Taylor if I could blog about this and he was reserved about it because it's in a very unfinished state. At least people have to be dedicated enough to NetBSD to bother compiling a kernel and writing up useful crash debug output 😉

tcmart14

nia Yea that is true, it can be rough to get people to do those steps and give good output. I just figured it might be a good opportunity to tell people to 'put their money where there mouth is,' since I've noticed some groaning about graphics on BSD on r/BSD. If those people are serious, they should take the opportunity to help out with at least by testing. I would, but none of my computers have graphics or at least graphics new enough to worry about support. I think my 2009 mac mini has a graphics card built in, but I just use it as a NetBSD test box over ssh and the age of it, the graphics is probably already supported or not relevant enough to spend the developer's resources (time) to support it.

oui

nia At least people have to be dedicated enough to NetBSD to bother compiling a kernel and writing up useful crash debug output

I'm willing to help with this, but I don't know how to provide useful crash debug info for developers. Is there some guide I can refer to?

I have two different Dell Optiplex machines (3020M and 3040M) that I can test the kernel with the new DRM/KMS stack on.

JuvenalUrbino

tcmart14 I just figured it might be a good opportunity to tell people to 'put their money where there mouth is,' since I've noticed some groaning about graphics on BSD on r/BSD. If those people are serious...

r/BSD is one of the most toxic techie community I've ever come across in my modest *nix computing history. A masterful showcase of the Dunning–Kruger effect.
From time to time something interesting pops up there and makes it worth to keep it among my reddit subscription, but that's all.
On the plus side, the community seems very OpenBSD-centric and I doubt most people would be factually interested in trying the new graphic stack. If they were, they would probably find the info they need elsewhere.
The amount of common places, vague assumptions, and outdated info I've seen posted on r/BSD -regarding NetBSD- is disheartening

tcmart14

JuvenalUrbino To be fair, NetBSD doesnt not have a history of advertising features to the community I have noticed, unless you go and look on the NetBSD blog. I love NetBSD and it is great. The overall impression I have is the development team is fantastic, but they keep their head down and do development, they are not out there evangelizing features or their work. Which is fine, I feel like everything I look, there is some great progress being made in areas of NetBSD.

As an example, I believe this was brought up on another thread on here. NetBSD implements many of the same security features as OpenBSD and has beaten OpenBSD to implementing (time wise) for some of those, however this is little known about.

nia

oui

You can set in sysctl.conf:

ddb.onpanic?=0
ddb.commandonenter=bt;show registers;sync

This will save crash dumps to /var/crash which can be examined with crash(8) when decompressed, particularly useful is the "bt" (backtrace) command.. Perhaps more usefully if you've built a kernel you get netbsd.gdb, which can be opened with gdb, then you can open a crash dump in gdb with "target kvm /var/crash/..." and get a much more elaborate backtrace.

It is also useful to build a kernel with the LOCKDEBUG option enabled.

JuvenalUrbino

@nia I'll test the updated nouveau and i915drmkms on Nvidia GTX 1060 and Kaby Lake respectively

JuvenalUrbino

tcmart14 you're definitely right. Whether doing development and not evangelizing is an asset or and handicap is not for me to state, but for the time being I'll say the answer is not to be taken for granted.

The message I wanted to pass is that, from my perspective, even if I had to ask a OpenBSD question I'd much rather go to r/openbsd or DaemonForums than r/BSD. As everywhere, alongside hotheads, there are undoubtedly skillful and patient users even on r/BSD providing unbiased, thorough and valuable answers, but the overall sensation I got from reading a bunch of posts never raised in me an interest in participating to that community.

nia

/r/BSD is honestly full of clueless nutjobs.

Mosfet

Hey @nia , any news on this merge? Will it make it in time for 10.0?

nia

Mosfet If we're lucky it will make it into 10.0. It is not ready for merging yet -- I'm currently helping Riastradh debug a problem where applications exit under i915.

neubaer

nia Do you know if support for virtual GPUs is planned? (QXL and virtio GPU in QEMU)
I tried yesterday and they didn't work for me.

Otherwise I have some AMD cards that I can test over the weekend (WX 2100 and RX 560).

Mosfet

nia

Fingers crossed for the merge! Updated GPU drivers (and ZFS root) would be awesome feature for 10! 😄

Thanks for the update.

nia

neubaer No, but please test your AMD cards and report the results.

neubaer

nia The RX 560 works. The WX 2100 doesn't, but I may have made a mistake so I'll re-test tomorrow. I don't have space for a dedicated test machine, so I went with a VM with PCI passthrough.

Also the default ctwm config you made is awesome. I have a 4k screen and the font scaling by default is great.