[Nouveau] (Free)BSD support?

[Chris]

On Fri, 07 Nov 2014 10:06:06 +0100 Jean-Sébastien Pédron
<dumbbell at FreeBSD.org> wrote

> On 07.11.2014 03:22, Chris wrote:
> > On Fri, 7 Nov 2014 12:11:08 +1000 Dave Airlie <airlied at gmail.com> wrote
> >> this is a kernel driver that needs porting, not just a userspace driver,
> >> there are no userspace drivers anymore. porting the X.org userspace
> >> driver is required but not sufficient.
> >
> > Indeed. I _think_ I understood correctly. I can't envision any _real_
> > problems. If I understand correctly, it'll be a matter of creating a
> > kernel module for the BSD platform, and making it loadable (kldload,
> > in BSD speak). Which will allow it to work with the resources made
> > available to the kernel (hardware). In fact it should be even easier,
> > given that there is a Linux ABI available on BSD which even nVidia
> > makes use of, with the blobs they provide.
> > Do I seem on track?
> 
> Hi!
> 
> The Nouveau kernel driver is close to the Radeon kernel in terms of
> DRM/TTM infrastructure requirements. We have that working in FreeBSD.
Good news!
> 
> So the task consists of:
>     1. Taking Nouveau from Linux, preferrably 3.8 to keep our DRM code
>        on the same base (so we can update the whole consistently).
>     2. Adding the source files to the FreeBSD kernel
>     3. Start the porting effort: the locking primitives, the PCI API,
>        how memory is allocated, etc. are different compared to Linux.
> 
OK
> It's probably not that difficult to do, however, it needs time. I would
> recommend to not start this effort right now: we are in the process of
> updating the DRM device-independent code to match Linux 3.8.
Ahh. Thanks for the potential time savings. :)
> Furthermore, I'm preparing a proposal to have some sort of Linux kernel
> API wrapper above FreeBSD facilities to reduce the diff with Linux and
> help with porting new drivers.
Excellent. Please keep me in the loop. I have the time, and resources to
devote to helping, or taking it all on as a whole, if necessary.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

--Chris

> 
> -- 
> Jean-Sébastien Pédron