NAME

drm - Direct Rendering Manager (DRI kernel support)

SYNOPSIS

i915drm* at vga? mach64drm* at vga? mgadrm* at vga? r128drm* at vga? radeondrm* at vga? savagedrm* at vga? sisdrm* at vga? tdfxdrm* at vga? viadrm* at vga?

options DRM_DEBUG

DESCRIPTION

The Direct Rendering Manager is part of the Direct Rendering Infrastructure (see http://dri.freedesktop.org/) for supporting video acceleration (3d acceleration, mostly).

The drm drivers provide support for the following chipsets:

i915drm
Intel i915, i945
mach64drm
Mach64 (3D Rage Pro, Rage)
mgadrm
Matrox G[24]00, G[45]50
r128drm
ATI Rage 128
radeondrm
ATI Radeon
savagedrm
S3 Savage
sisdrm
SiS
tdfxdrm
3dfx (Voodoo)
viadrm
VIA

To make use of the driver, X(7) must be compiled with DRI support, Mesa DRI drivers must be installed, the appropriate /dev/dri/card* device must exist, and DRI must be enabled in the X configuration file.

Details for these steps:

  1. X must be compiled with DRI support. On i386, this is usually the default.

  2. Mesa (see http://www.mesa3d.org/) should be compiled for the netbsd-dri target, patch available at http://issc.uj.ac.za/~yorick/drm/mesa.patch

  3. The device node must exist:
    mkdir -p /dev/dri
    mknod /dev/dri/card0 c 180 0
    chgrp wheel /dev/dri/card0
    chmod 0660 /dev/dri/card0
    

  4. Enable DRI in the X configuration (either xorg.conf or XF86Config):
    Section "Module"
            ...
            Load  "dri"
            Load  "GLcore"
            Load  "glx"
    EndSection
    Section "DRI"
            Group "wheel"
            Mode 0660
    EndSection
    

Debugging output can be enabled and disabled by setting the sysctl(8) node hw.dri.debug. Additional information can be obtained from the sysctl(8) nodes hw.dri, hw.dri.card0, hw.dri.card1, etc.

SEE ALSO

X(7)

HISTORY

DRM was first available for Linux. Subsequently Eric Anholt ported the DRM kernel modules to FreeBSD. Erik Reid adapted the FreeBSD DRM kernel modules to NetBSD. As DRM continued to develop the NetBSD support was neglected. Tonnerre Lombard got the DRM modules working again, but DRM development once again left the NetBSD support behind. Finally Yorick Hardy took the FreeBSD DRM source and managed to get it compiling and working again on NetBSD, thanks largely to the efforts of all those mentioned above. Subsequently Matthias Drochner improved the DRM file hierarchy for NetBSD and committed the DRM kernel drivers.

The drm drivers appeared in NetBSD5.0.

AUTHORS

Eric Anholt, Terry Barnaby, Erdi Chen, Michel Daenzer, Leif Delgass, Frank C. Earl, Rickard E. Faith, Jose Fonseca, Nicolai Haehnle, Jeff Hartmann, Thomas Hellstrom, Gareth Hughes, Felix Kuehling, Sung-Ching Lin, Kevin E. Martin, Jared D. McNeill, Daryll Strauss, Keith Whitwell

CAVEATS

Disable AIGLX if necessary (xorg.conf):
Section "ServerFlags"
        Option  "AIGLX" "off"
EndSection
        

Section "Extensions" Option "Composite" "Disable" EndSection

In case of errors, /dev/dri/card0 may be changed, make sure to recreate it in that case.

options DRM_DEBUG can slow DRI down a lot, disable it once drm works.