freebsd
Request to restore support for vboxvideo, vmwgfx and virtio DRM drivers
Dear drm-kmod maintainers,
The vboxvideo and vmwgfx DRM drivers were removed in commit 787a917, and have not been compiled or maintained for over a year.
However, with the rapid adoption of Wayland in many desktop environments and the gradual deprecation of traditional X11, full DRM driver support is absolutely essential—even for virtual GPUs such as those in VirtualBox and VMware.
Modern desktops—especially Wayland—cannot function properly without these DRM drivers. In virtualized environments, the absence of vboxvideo and vmwgfx means FreeBSD users are effectively unable to run or use Wayland-based desktops at all.
Therefore, I kindly urge you to restore or reintroduce support for these drivers. If full maintenance is not currently feasible, even basic support or a framework for community patches would greatly benefit the FreeBSD desktop user community.
Thank you for your ongoing work maintaining DRM support in FreeBSD.
Best regards, ykla
For KVM / Qemu users the virtio drm driver would also be interesting.
From a naive look at those drivers they seem to be really small compared to i915 and amdgpu but does anyone know if we're missing something specific for them or is it just missing interest?
Enabling the virtio dri driver (and virgl) when building with mesa get build fine. No idea what other things are needed for it to work in a vm. But at least for virgl, it is possible to do so on FreeBSD.
Dear drm-kmod maintainers,
The vboxvideo and vmwgfx DRM drivers were removed in commit 787a917, and have not been compiled or maintained for over a year.
However, with the rapid adoption of Wayland in many desktop environments and the gradual deprecation of traditional X11, full DRM driver support is absolutely essential—even for virtual GPUs such as those in VirtualBox and VMware.
Modern desktops—especially Wayland—cannot function properly without these DRM drivers. In virtualized environments, the absence of vboxvideo and vmwgfx means FreeBSD users are effectively unable to run or use Wayland-based desktops at all.
Therefore, I kindly urge you to restore or reintroduce support for these drivers. If full maintenance is not currently feasible, even basic support or a framework for community patches would greatly benefit the FreeBSD desktop user community.
Thank you for your ongoing work maintaining DRM support in FreeBSD.
Best regards, ykla
I partly resurrected/readopted vboxvideo to the as of today latest drm-kmod from ports on 16 current in a vbox 7.1 guest. It attaches and takes over the efifb correctly and creates /dev/dri/card0 but IIUC it does not support 3d accel in virtualbox as a /dev/dri/renderX device. Therefore this work does not give us wayland support on fbsd in VirtualBox.. Besides that startx/X11 crashes the vm
Besides that startx/X11 crashes the vm
As in, VirtualBox crashes? If so that should be a bug report there.
Besides that startx/X11 crashes the vm
As in, VirtualBox crashes? If so that should be a bug report there.
The vm goes unresponsive no GURU meditation, just a black screen, and the ssh session hangs as well so a tad difficult to debug. BTW If interested I can share my work?
Seconding this as vmware is completely nonfunctional in terms of wayland support without the kmod and I really would like to see these drivers updated again because of how most desktops are moving in terms of development favoring wayland over X11 in the future
