hello!

ive installed freebsd on my computer with a radeon 4000 gpu. my driver works, mate works, but i am unable to find where i need to add the tearfree option to xorgb

polarian: It might be worth looking at rocket.chat as an alternative to discord.

it doesnt look like anyones written docs on xorg screen tearing on freebsd its all forum posts none of which are applicable to my setup

waffles: probably not what you're hoping for but, mupuf.org/blog/2018/09/24/teaching_x_modesetting_new_tricks suggests there's a whole patchset required.

yeah i need that tearfree patch

theres several different paths that config file can go in but it depends on what kind of gpu u have and when the person wrote it

Ah sorry

someritmes it goes in /usr/ sometimes its /etc/

I have only opened a discord site *once* on a browser, for 5 mins :)

polarian: i think the problem is a valid option that people can get on board with that's newer. xmpp/jabberd was a good solution where irc was lacking but google and facebook made sure that died off rather abruptly. matrix is a nightmare to administer. even element can't keep up with the moving goal post.

i'm not a big fan of using proprietary services and i'd love for everything to be decentralized but the alternatives are either lacking or difficult to admin. they just don't have the discord money :)

i'm still trying to figure out what the thought process was with regard to encryption on matrix that is session specific and doesn't rely on a normal key exchange.

jellyfin is to plex as matrix is to discord .. and speaking of jellyfin i need to see if i can get it working in freebsd

Macer: there's a jellyfin port that works well

/2/3

hi

please I need help configuring X on an old laptop with hybrid nvidia graphics (GEFORCE 610M)

I have X working but with no OpenGL

Posterdati: I had one of those weird nvidia laptop hybrid things once. it worked perfectly fine. all i had to do was to search the correct driver on nvidia.com and install them manually.

Posterdati: of course, that means: no updates via pkg. but since the chip was ancient, i doubt there even were any updates anymore

so i added this to my xorg.conf.d-20-amdgpu.conf but when i did lightdm no longer starts on boot

i think i figured it out just needed to switch to xfce instead of mate

you've made the right choice young padowan

yes, xfce works

ya xfce has a way to switch compositor easily

\

SKull: it seems that now it is working, simply rebooted

The good old Microsoft reboot method

™

wavefunction: funny enough I know about rocket chat, ever since they were a small startup, its how I got into self hosting actually, young me thought it was really cool being able to self host a chat service, but when I discovered XMPP and also when I learned to love IRC, it fell out of favour.

I am minimalistic these days

I say young me but im still young compared to the average BSD user :/

what is the age of averege BSD user polarian ?

Macer: I would argue XMPP lacks nothing prosody is easy to administrate and is available on all BSDs (to the best of my knowledge), movim can do everything Discord can now, but is browser only, desktop clients are lacking in some features, mainly audio and video calling. Plus XMPP has features Discord hasnt, such as being decentralised, and the fact it has E2EE.

mzar: going based off EuroBSDCon alone, I would say 30-40

and chatting on IRC seems to be rather representative. Mind you, I dont use Discord... maybe the freebsd discord has a lot of young BSD users?

freebsd also have statistics, the average contributor age is 31 iirc

ha... that's mobile BSD user, but average one is I bet somewhere between 45 and 65

lol

I know 3-4 other BSD users under 30... thats it...

...contributor age in the time of first conrribution ;-)

it doesnt seem to be as attractive to the young folks as Linux does

and the young folks tend to be heavily pro-GPL

so BSD stance against GPL could be hindering support from younger devs

Posterdati: in general you dont want nvidia full stop for BSD or Linux.

ya my friend traded me a 3090 and every day i consider putting my 6900xt back in

im severely limited in what distro and software i can run

idk why people even buy nvidia where AMD provides similar performance at half the pricr

price*

is a few fps and better ray tracing worth the price? imo no

mostly for enterprise users that need cuda

thats only because compute is nvidia orientated...

nothing stops the market shifting to support AMD if the demand was there

iirc some resolve cant use amd gpus for rendering either...

nvidia only

sadly nvidia is like 99% marketshare in workstation/server/oem

i dont think ive ever seen an amd gpu in a data center

things change in time...

if nvidia keep their extortionate prices up then the market may well shift

its why im surprised nvidias gone so long without having to support linux very well, they've been pissing off their customers for longer than i knew what nvidia was

I bought a non-nvidia GPU for the very first time in my life a few weeks ago.

I heavily aplaude nvidia for having provided freebsd drivers all these years tho.

a yr ago when I did some upgrades to a pc I dont use (xD) I had two choices, a rtx 3080 for £700 or a rx 6800 for £350-400, in performance the latter is just a few fps slower than the 3080, and was hundreds cheaper...

luckily in year of our lord 2025 if u get a newer nvidia card made in the last 10 years and u use a distro where the maintainers don't hate nvidia on principle u should be fine

jbo: freebsd nvidia support is decent? surprising...

jbo: what GPU did you get?

Has nouveau been ported to freebsd, iirc its GPL so I assume no?

polarian, has been 100% rock solid for me. with various nvidia GPUs from various generations (also GeForce and Quadros). never had a single issue with the FreeBSD driver provided by Nvidia.

SponiX, Intel B580

polarian: Nvidia provides binary drivers for FreeBSD. And they are fairly up to date and functional from what I hear

SponiX: yeah but nobody likes blobs :)

I disagree

dont get me wrong amd cards need blobs too but the driver itself is open source iirc

jbo: does that B580 work on FreeBSD at all?

bloobs in my motherboard, bloobs in my wifi

SponiX, with 6.6, yes

jbo: NICE

yeah amd and nvidia moved to proprietary firmware cause u dont need access to that and it exposes secrets

I have an RX 5700 in my FreeBSD machine right now

waffles: as if anyone has the means of production to copy them

Those B580 cards look nice though. I've only seen the B570 in stock lately

they both rely on TSMC anyways

I think ivy is using AMD GPUs with FreeBSD too

ya its the same crap with hdmi they dont want u using their new tech on open source driver

My new 9070 XT end up going into my Linux machine. It requires kernel 6.13.4 of higher. So, I'll likely see FreeBSD support of it in like 2027 lol

SponiX, I hope that the intel stuff sicks, jup. they seem to have very reasonable price/performance characteristics in the current market.

does intel fab the gpu themself?

no

because intel have their own fabs unlike amd and nvidia

they were doing alright but now a b580 is well ove rmspr in the states

ah...

jbo: tsmc as well then?

people r hating on the 5060 and 9060 because they have low vram but gamers dont really care about vram at 1080p

waffles, yeah I had the same problem when I had to buy one. prices came donw here now tho.

(after I bought it - of course)

ya thats always the way it goes xd

waffles: Yeah, a YouTuber was saying recently that prices are going back down. But I've not seen any evidence of this yet. And also don't have my hopes up with the AI bubble

well thats the trick with the new cards is they have no vram so ai companies dont care about them

so theyre readily available at around msrp

where "around msrp" usually means 50% above msrp :p

waffles: well, even at 1080p cards with 8GB are struggling on new titles these days. I wouldn't consider a card unless it had at least 12G in 2025

I dont get the entire 4K craze

1080p works fineee

yeah they said 300 dollars and newergg has them for 300 dollars

resolution isnt everything, so many people buy cheap 4K and it has awful colour accuracy...

huh? they are currently $370 here

only reason i use 4k is i have a 43" monitor so i dont have to deal with dual monitor shenanigans

I bought a 1440p monitor. Only to end up running it at 1080p because scaling pisses me off with little glitches

I would argue a decent 1080p monitor would trump a 1440p/4K cheapo monitor

plus 1080p just works with almost anything

SponiX, a friend of mine tried that strategy once but he switched back to three 1440p :p

you want a screen for your laptop, plug it right in

but my 4k monitor ended up costing a fair bit even though it only does 60hz and its ips, because i got it specifically for design work so it has really nice colors

they dont make this kind of panel anymore though so idk what im gonna get next

does anyone game on freebsd using linux compat?

I remember reading steam works flawlessly with the compat

waffles: Yeah, getting something that is color accurate will cost you

polarian: yes, more people in discord for this IIRC

and then proton works too

dch o/

dch: wont catch me alive using Discord tho ;P

polarian: Only Linux app I am running right now is Discord ironically enough

i definitely wanna try some light gaming on my freebsd box cause ive got a first gen i7, 16gb ram and a radeon 4000

polarian: the community is, where the community is

fine fine, if they want to use Discord I will see them in Zagreb /j

Yeah, the FreeBSD Discord has a pretty lively #Gaming channel

but yeah it is embarassing foss projects are using discord for communications, its the only reason i still have it other than soem gaming stuff

there is one freebsd dev I know who only uses discord... I met him in Dublin (eurobsdcon 2024) then at FOSDEM

will see him again in Zagreb I believe? still not getting Discord to speak to him.

if ur not already on like 20 other platforms youre ngmi

SponiX: why not #freebsd-gaming

(libera)

oh there is a #freebsd-games

for me, because I don't actually Game

im not into gaming anyways

I am in #FreeBSD-Desktop though. I try to help out with the KDE Plasma desktop guys

provide them with a build vm and follow their progress

im in there too, not sure why I joined...

Audio doesnt seem to work for me on 14.2-RELEASE though

I've got to jack with hardware today

I verified it worked using Linux, and then checked that the devices werr under /dev/sndstat

but nothing

so who knows

is it a tiger lake laptop by any chance?

I have physically disconnected the speakers, and removed the microphone and webcam for security though...

you might look into finding what your specific sound device is and setting it in /etc/sysctl.conf like this: hw.snd.default_unit=4

dont u wanna remove the webcam for security? yo man its linux the webcam doesnt work

I have to have that set before my machine will playback audio. Just choosing the output device in Plasma alone doesn't make sound work for me

jbo: no ivy bridge

SponiX: I know which it is, as it used to work on 14.0

aye. only sound issues I have is with a tiger lake laptop and I don't seem to be the only one.

I did a reinstall to harden the laptop a little more

it never worked since

ouch

that sucks

doesnt matter as I dont use it currently, but it would be nice to plug in headphones and stuff

waffles: I use freebsd as a daily driver for my laptop

and it doesnt matter I dont use it, it removes the attack vector

I'm back on 15-CURRENT with pkgbase. I had terrible performance issues with video playback on 14.2-RELEASE -- never could track down the exact cause

I speculate it was my GPU not being properly used with drm-61-kmod, and that drm-66-kmod on CURRENT is working properly

i finally snagged a desktop at the hobby club meeting that i can run freebsd on

i always wanted freebsd on hardware but i never had the right computer for it

waffles: Yeah, my decade old 2011-3 X99 systems work well with it ;)

rn im rocking a i7 920

If the RX 5700 was for sure the issue, I was gonna put in an AMD RX 580 8G card LOL

oh yeah this machine came with a rv770, dont rly know which one

nice little gpu

i remember going from rx560 to rx580 of FreeBSD

i've seen enough back during that day

really glad CURRENT fixed my performance problems. I was actually having to consider ditching the bare metal FreeBSD install on this box and going back to Linux

the same day i've switched to windows on that machine

wsky: ouch

good my hardware didn't break

ya i was pleasantly surprised current works on my hardware

got a little xfce desktop running idk rly what to do with it yet

waffles: I can't help but promote the KDE Plasma build. XFCE is very nice, but KDE Plasma 6.3.x is just way better IMHO

I ran XFCE for like 20 years before switching to KDE

It even has pkg updates with the GUI using KDE Discover

system updates too, if you have pkgbase

oh yeah i might try it out SponiX

i use kde on my main linux desktop

waffles: did you do the current install recently with the pkgbase option?

uhhh i think the only option i changed was i added ports tree

do u know how to switch the compositor in kde, thats why i switched to xfce was i had extreme screen tearing

waffles: Plasma 6.3.5 is running great for me on FreeBSD CURRENT

ill check it out

waffles: xorg with an AMD GPU? there is an option you can put in the xorg.conf that specifies getting rid of tearing

They just made mention of it in Discord recently. But I can also look it up if you like

It is literally a "tearfree" option in the config

I've not had problems with it, so haven't had to use it on this install

hrm

while installing kde my terminal crashed

so now i cant install anything it says pkg database is busy while closing

TearFree True

Odd, I wouldn't think running "pkg" would crash anything

unless it updated something your terminal depends on. But even that isn't normally an issue

well i need to figure out that error otherwise my system is bricked lol

"pkg install kde" should work just fine

is there anything similar to how u can fix dpkg when it breaks like that

Yeah, it is a "file.lock" like Debian dpkg

Google "FreeBSD pkg lock" and see what comes up

It could be a file.pid instead of file.lock -- can't remember which exactly

yeah i did nobody seems to have fixed the issue

hmm

all of the posts say "how do i fix this"

im gonna try and reboot see if that does anything

rebooting seems to have worked

i couldnt launch plasma wayland from lightdm i should have probably guessed that wouldnt work

Yeah, from my understanding the Plasma build on FreeBSD is still xorg only

aight well it seems to work and with no screen tearing so thasts nice

i should rly clean up my install now that ive done all this

I've got a 2TB nvme and a 4070 Super to install today

yaaaaaay

sounds like a thing

Debating if I want to just add the nvme to the machine and mount it, or if I want to clone my OS over to it

Shit, almost forgot, I've got a 20-core processor chip to install today also

Then if I have the energy, I should probably install the new CPU cooler as well. Chances of me making it that far are slim though

is ur cooler difficult to remove

i had to do a motherboard swap recently it sucked

Ones I get now all have good/easy mounting hardware

ya i got the dh15 and its a pretty simple 2 screw job provided u have a screwdriver long enough

This cooler is near the performance of the D15 at like less than half the cost

oh yes thats a nice cooler

wwhen i got mine the assassin wasnt out yet

I have a Noctual U14S with dual fan setup. a newer model Hyper 212 Black Edition. And like 4 or 5 of the Peerless Assassin coolers

alright moment of truth see if i setup everything correctly

some people have unfortunate names here lol

thx for the recommendation kde running smooth as silk

like me :D

waffles: Yeah, I was glad to have the opportunity to help out with it (providing a build vm for pkg build testing)

If you want to have a fun comparison. Run "ps aux" on FreeBSD with KDE Plasma, then do the same thing on a Linux machine

and have a look at how many more processes the Linux machine has running

That reminds me, I also need to move my Minecraft Server instance back over to FreeBSD after jacking around with everything else

oh yeah i run kde on my cachyos desktop too

hm it doesnt like screen locking lol

i might have needed to set a user password for that otherwise i have to hit switch user and that causes it to unlock to a black screen where i can hit keys

Yeah, I had to disable power management and screen locking both

my normal GUI user has no password also. and when locked, it will not let me unlock lol

and that machine has 256G of ram, and I didn't want to allocate 256G of disk space to be able to hibernate LOL

i always liked how linux distros default to power management on

bro its linux sleep doesnt work

Pretty sure the Debian 12 install on my Sons new/old Thinkpad power management works at least some

> Macer| could have been worse. could have been a password or key

yeah, leaked my root password to an irc channel once

sloppy focus aka. focus follows mouse, very useful feature, but dangerous

ah dang kde keeps crashing

thats a bummer

> SponiX| pcpartpicker.com/product/CwqPxr/the…fm-cpu-cooler-peerless-assassin-120

sadly latest intel processors and even amd 9950x3d and up everyone claims air cooling is no longer safe :\

just a graphics card here in Croatia is 1500EUR/$1500 and then your have your liquid cooling leak all onto it

(if the nvidia graphics card it self 5070, 5080, 5080 doesn't burn your house down first via 12vhpwr connector)

I can't wrap my head around how this state of affairs became acceptable

aic: Air Cooling not being safe is a lie. That large tower cooler performs similar to a 240 AIO. And with it you don't have to worry about pump failure or leaks

waffles: odd, mine is rock solid on 15-CURRENT

aic: if you don't want to take my word for it. join the #hardware channel, folks there will confirm that cooler is legit for everything currently on the market

I have one on a 7800X3D right now. And the fans barely have to spin even under full load

waffles: check "dmesg" to see if there are any errors. stability shouldn't be a problem on that Plasma 6.3.5

ive got old hardware SponiX so i expected some issues on 14.2

thats what these old des are for anyways

the thrift store was generous with me today and donated me an old vista era monitor

i just wanted it cause it has dvi and im using a vga to dvi adapter rn

waffles: My X99 system is a decade old and still works fine

mine is uhhh

2009

maybe 2008

i like this computer because its a gateway lol

this drive clone process is gonna take forever

how are you cloning it?

rescuezilla

seems to be doing a byte for byte clone instead of just the data

It is saying like an hour. But this is from SATA SSD to nvme -- would think that would be speedy

what type of SSD is the destination? most consumer SSDs (even NVMe ones) get extremely slow once the SLC write cache fills up

Chances are it is the standard SATA SSD source drive being the problem child. the NVME it is writing to can probably run circles around it

At least that is my hopes, and why I am cloning to it LOL

Source

Destination

I’m starting to think that a fresh install may have been quicker lol

probably

I have to reinstall soon too. The usb drives I’ve been using to boot are garbage so I grabbed a 16GB dom to use. But now the install is going to be mostly shell based tomfoolery to move most things off to external pools instead of rpool.

At least the jails returning should be nothing more than a zpool import.

Macer: when you get bored some time, you can for sure teach me the basics of zfs send/receive from one machine to another

Is there anything like docker hub for BSD jails, or do I have to go in and manage them all manually like they are seperate BSD VMs?

Rudde: podman, pot

podman has their own hub?

podman means you do not have to manage the jails manually like a VM. i'm not sure how many pre-built OCI containers there are for freebsd aside from the base system itself

Oh, I thought jails was the best way of conterinaring on BSD

jails are just a mechanism. if you want the whole OCI thing, you need to use something like podman

Rudde: podman and pot are based on jails, it's just a different way to manage them

it's like on linux, lxc and docker use the same underlying kernel features but work in different ways

wasn't docker release before LXC was in the kernel?

they're both based on namespaces and cgroups (for the most part)

Soo... Are there something like docker hub tho, where people can share BSD compatible containers that are maintained, or would I have to maintian every container myself?

you'd have to build nearly everything yourself

wsky: I have a rx 580 gathering dust

maybe I might donate it to someone at EuroBSDCon

its not really worth selling

its what... £70-80?

at best...

polarian: if not wrong have 264 and 265 support which mean still decent upgrade for older setups... ;D

polarian: if you want, you can still buy one NEW for like $150 lol

They are seriously still producing them

they are solid cards

I have a rx 6800 and no need for the rx 570

580*

I also have an old GT 730

in my machine im using now i have a rv770 lol

I should have gotten the 7900 XT instead of the 9070 XT. Then it could be in this FreeBSD machine instead of having to put it in my Linux one