Intel KMS driver

Welcome to Intel DRM/KMS Extreme Graphics!

The xorg-video-intel package is the open-source 2D graphics driver for the X Window System as implemented by X.org. It supports a variety of Intel graphics chipsets including:

•     i830M,845G,852GM,855GM,865G,
•     915G/GM,945G/GM/GME,946GZ
•     G/GM/GME/Q965,
•     G/Q33,G/Q35,G41,G/Q43,G/GM/Q45
•     PineView-M (Atom N400 series)
•     PineView-D (Atom D400/D500 series)
•     Intel HD Graphics: 2000-6000,
•     Intel Iris Graphics: 5100/6100, and
•     Intel Iris Pro Graphics: 5200/6200/P6300.

Open source kernel driver(s) by Oracle:

• S11: https://hg.openindiana.org/upstream/oracle/x-cons/x-s11-update-clone/file/221e9d9cc9cb/open-src/kernel
• S12: https://hg.openindiana.org/upstream/oracle/x-cons/x-s12-clone/file/42bcaa2f7d25/open-src/kernel

Relevant kernel code is located in drm and i915 subfolders.

illumos port of Oracle code is available here:

https://github.com/illumos/gfx-drm

Martin Bochnig, creator of OpenSXCE, initially backported the S12 driver to illumos, available in oi-userland until December 20. 2016.

It was then superseeded by the new gate (#2678) providing improvements to the gfx_private interface and agpgart driver, as well as containing userland libraries used by graphics, like libdrm.

Some graphic adapters like Sandy Bridge GT2 may still benefit from the older drivers' better resilience w.r.t GPU hangs.

References

Alan Coopersmith pointed to the following documents regarding DRI/KMS: 

• http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Solaris-DRM-KMS-2015
• http://www.x.org/wiki/Events/XDC2015/Program/#Fishel_status_drm_i915_solaris
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager
• http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/kernel_mode_setting
• http://lanyrd.com/topics/x-window-system

Additionally, information about driver development:

• https://01.org/linuxgraphics
• http://dri.freedesktop.org/docs/drm/
• http://blog.ffwll.ch/2013/01/i915gem-crashcourse-overview.html
• blog posts from the i915 Linux maintainer http://blog.ffwll.ch/

Known Issues

SNA

May causes segmentation fault if enabled. If so, just disable SNA and you can copy attached 20-intel-uxa.conf to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/.

For now, UXA mode is set by default.

Sandy Bridge GT1

A hardware bug requires implementing a workaround in the Intel ringbuffer implementation, occasional 1-2 second hangs may occur.

Gen >= 8

Generation 8 specifics in Intel ringbuffer implementation are not committed yet.

Hardware Matrix

Reference:

• https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel/tree/src/i915_pciids.h
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_graphics_processing_units
• http://src.illumos.org/source/xref/gfx-drm/usr/src/uts/intel/io/i915/i915_drv.c#294

Testing

Experimental binaries (Archived)

Llinks to debug kernel binaries in this email (mirrored as attachments to this page):

• http://openindiana.org/pipermail/oi-dev/2016-January/004059.html
• i915 -> /kernel/drv/amd64/
• drm_gem_kms -> /kernel/misc/amd64

Instructions:

01.) cd /tmp
02.) wget http://opensxce.org/intelkms_working_testbins/Intel_DRMxKMS_S12_to_Illumos_backport__RELEASE/01__GLOBAL/01__BINS/TAR/proto__root_i386.tar.bz2
03.) su -
04.) beadm create MyNewBE
05.) beadm activate MyNewBE
06.) beadm mount MyNewBE /a
07.) cd /a
08.) bzcat /tmp/proto__root_i386.tar.bz2|tar xvf -
09.) This README assumes that the old /kernel/drv/amd64/i915 was already add_drv'ed before, 
     if not, `add_drv -R /a i915` now
10.) Then make a reconf reboot and you should end up in a Intel-KMS-DRM-GEM Gnome session!
    Don't forget to also remove or rename /a/etc/X11/xorg.conf (or replace "vesa" with "intel" in the device section)
11.) mv /dev/dri /dev/dri__OLD
12.) touch /a/reconfigure
13.) bootadm update-archive -R /a -v
14.) reboot -p -- -r