• GraphicsOld
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I just want to fix that black screen when I start an X session

And much much more...

The handbook is great but sometimes it just isn't as friendly as descriptive as you would like it to be. This is a Wiki page to share our hacks, arcane knowledge, workarounds and diagnosis tricks.

1. Resources

• People tend to put hardware-specific solutions on the Laptops wiki pages. You might want to check them out.

  • Laptops/Lenovo_Yoga_3_14/X

2. FAQ

• Chapter 5. The X Window System (FreeBSD Handbook)

2.1. Choosing the right driver

2.1.1. How can I check what driver I need?

You can list your graphics hardware with:

pciconf -lv | grep display -B 3 -A 1

2.1.2. Is my graphics card supported?

Check out Graphics.

If it is not supported then you might want to check out:

• Graphics/SCFB

2.1.3. I'm still not sure what I should install...

This subsection is a work in progress. Ping us on an IRC channel or a mailing list if you spot an error or you know how to fill in the missing information.

2.1.3.1. Intel Graphics

• You need a kernel driver and an Xorg driver.
  • Example:

    • An example of an Xorg driver would be xf86-video-intel. It does not bring support for any new hardware. That's what the kernel driver is for.

    • An example of a kernel driver would be drm-next-kmod.

      • drm-next-kmod specifically is meant to replace an older kernel driver that comes in the FreeBSD 11 release.

    • You would use xf86-video-intel on both drm-next-kmod and without it as xf86-video-intel is a userspace driver to drive the X server.

    • You might not need to install xf86-video-intel and still have graphics running as there is a generic KMS driver called modesetting already included in the xorg package. Installing xf86-video-intel might not be necessary but would give you more control over how your graphics is rendered (see intel(4) for more details).

The table is based on the one from Graphics, which is updated much more often.

• The i915kms kernel-side driver is shipped with the generic FreeBSD kernel and is available as a module. No need to install anything.

  • TODO: Add a reference to a manual page describing i915kms.

• modesetting(4) can be installed with xorg-server so you get it when you install xorg

• intel(4) can be installed with xf86-video-intel

• intel(4) has little to no advantage over the generic modesetting(4) driver. Unless you need extra control over your graphics hardware and rendering options, you don't need intel(4). In fact, as of 2018.04.15 the FreeBSD Graphics Wiki discourages the installation of intel(4) as most likely any bugs encountered in Xorg will be patched first in the modesetting(4) codebase.

2.1.3.2. Nvidia

nvidia-modeset:

• nvidia-modeset is supplied by the nvidia-driver, as a way of using the kernel modesetting option to change resolution, instead of doing it in userspace.

• What is this nvidia-modeset all about? (svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/UPDATING)

2.2. Drivers

2.2.1. Kernel drivers

2.2.1.1. i915 / drm-next-kmod

• Wiki of the project bringing the driver to FreeBSD (github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics)

2.2.2. Xorg drivers

2.2.2.1. modesetting

• It can be used with both i915kms and drm-next-kmod.

• modesetting doesn't yet allow Option "TearFree" "True" in /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/98-tearfree.conf. (14.4.2018)

2.3. Specific hardware tricks

2.3.1. AMD GPU

2.3.1.1. I get significant screen tearing with my AMD GPU

In order to solve this you can add the following to /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-amdgpu.conf (the file does not exist by default):

Section "Device"
    Identifier "AMD"
    Driver "amdgpu"
    Option "DRI" "3"
    Option "TearFree" "true"
EndSection

2.3.2. Nvidia Optimus (Nvidia and Intel GPUs at the same time)

See Graphics/OptimusVideoSupport.

2.3.2.1. Using only the Intel card

In this section assumes that:

• You are configuring Xorg manually via xorg.conf (which is not recommended).

• You are using the intel(4) driver (xf86-video-intel) instead of modesetting(4) (although modesetting(4) is the recommended driver you should probably use).

Comment out Nvidia-related parts from your xorg.conf:

...

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Card0"
    Driver      "intel"
    BusID       "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection

#Section "Device"
#   Identifier  "Card1"
#   Driver      "nvidia"
#   BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"
#EndSection

...

Then add the following bits to rc.conf(5):

kld_list='i915kms'

2.4. Xorg configuration

2.4.1. How should I configure the X server? Should I generate any xorg.conf files?

No! These days Xorg relies entirely on autoconfiguration. Most of the time it is unnecessary to configure anything manually. In fact, you should only configure Xorg manually if you know what you are doing. Copy-pasting random code from ancient tutorials is rarely a good idea.

2.4.2. Do I need to enable the HAL daemon (hald) in rc.conf?

Not really, no. It is no longer needed to put enable_hald="YES" into rc.conf(5).

3. Troubleshooting

3.1. Black screens

3.1.1. The screen is going black with drm-next-kmod and amdgpu right after the module loads

• Are you running 12-CURRENT? If so then you should probably install your graphics drivers from ports. Things are changing really fast on the development branch hence the precompiled packages you install using pkg might be already outdated.

3.1.2. After resuming from S3 standby, the screen is black

• Possibly fixed by switching to TTY0 (Ctrl+Alt+F1) and back to TTY8 (Alt+F8).

• Another way of fixing it is to include compton --daemon in .xinitrc. Compton is not a part of the base system so it has to be installed first.

• Alternatively fixed by setting hw.acpi.reset_video to 1. See sysctl.conf(5).

3.2. Brightness

There is a dedicated wiki page: Graphics/Brightness.

3.3. OpenGL

3.3.1. OpenGL works while accelerated OpenGL doesn't work with my AMD GPU

As of 2018.04.03.

Xorg doesn't even put amdgpu into the autodetection list, it goes:

1. modesetting
2. scfb
3. vesa

regardless of whether amdgpu is installed or not.

Apparently, you get a modesetting DDX by default (even with xf86-video-amdgpu installed) on which for some reason radeonsi doesn't work and it falls back to LLVMpipe.

In order to solve this you can add the following to /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-amdgpu.conf (the file does not exist by default):

Section "Device"
    Identifier "AMD"
    Driver "amdgpu"
EndSection

Now you should get something along the following output when running glxinfo (from the graphics/mesa-demos port):

• glxinfo|grep "renderer string": OpenGL renderer string: AMD Radeon (TM) Pro WX 5100 Graphics (POLARIS10 / DRM 3.10.0 / 12.0-CURRENT, LLVM 5.0.1)

• glxinfo|grep "core profile version string" OpenGL core profile version string: 4.5 (Core Profile) Mesa 17.3.1

Now OpenGL should work.

3.4. Tearing

What's tearing anyway?

See this test video.

3.5. Transparency

In order to get transparency you'll need a compositor. It has to be installed manually unless your desktop environment comes with one.

Notable compositors:

• x11-wm/compton

  • It is used by the Lumina Desktop Environment.

3.6. Xorg error messages

3.6.1. "Cannot run in framebuffer mode. Please specify busIDs"

• Make sure that you've got your drivers installed.

TODO

3.6.2. "(EE) open /dev/dri/card0: No such file or directory"

TODO

3.6.3. "(EE) No devices detected.", "(EE) no screens found(EE)"

TODO

3.6.3.1. Related reported issues

• Xorg error No devices detected (unix.stackexchange.com)

3.6.4. ".Xauthority does not exist"

This error message isn't very informative. It just means that you won't be able to access the X server via X11 Forwarding over SSH

If you ever need to create the file, all you need to do is touch ~/.Xauthority - at which point you can use xauth(1) to modify ~/.Xauthority.

3.6.5. "D-Bus library appears to be incorrectly set up; failed to read machine uuid: Failed to open "/etc/machine-id": No such file or directory"

First of all, you probably forgot to add dbus_enable=YES to rc.conf(5). You can do it using either an editor or by running

   1 sysrc dbus_enable=YES

If it still does solve the issue then you've got to create the machine-id file by yourself. The the following command:

   1 dbus-uuidgen --ensure

4. Community

4.1. Mailing lists

• freebsd-desktop@freebsd.org (lists.freebsd.org)

• freebsd-x11@freebsd.org (lists.freebsd.org)

4.2. IRC

• freenode:

  • #freebsd

• EFNet:

  • #freebsd-xorg

See IRC/Channels for a list of all the FreeBSD IRC channels.

CategoryHowTo