The revival of my FreeBSD system meant that I was once again confronted with Xorg driver issues. The on-board GeForce 7050 isn't recognized by the nv(4x) driver, and the proprietary nvidia one is a no-go because I'm running FreeBSD amd64 (and the Linux driver only works on FreeBSD i386). So, time to shop around a little.

This is one of those cases where I wish the Internet would forget sometimes. Wading through the reports of video card compatibility from 2006 just isn't useful. I had one (I thought) simple question: will an ATI Radeon 4350 work with Xorg 1.6.5 under FreeBSD 8-STABLE?

Perhaps it's just my search-fu letting me down, but in the end I went and just bought one (as it's the cheapest video card available in town across the river right now).

And the answer seems to be: yes, the Radeon 4350 is supported under FreeBSD 8-STABLE with Xorg 1.6.5_1,1 and the xf86-video-ati 6.12.4_1 driver. At least I can get twm up and running and exit that same twm and restart X multiple times. As usual it took longest for me to remember which ports to install to get a workable X locally (xorg-minimal + xorg-apps + dbus and hal seems to do the trick).

Excerpt lines from Xorg.0.log:

(--) PCI:*(0:2:0:0) 1002:954f:1043:02a8 ATI Technologies Inc RV710 [Radeon HD 4350] rev 0, Mem @ 0xc0000000/268435456, 0xdfff0000/65536, I/O @ 0x0000e800/256, BIOS @ 0x????????/65536
(II) RADEON(0): [dri] Found DRI library version 1.3.0 and kernel module version 1.31.0
(II) RADEON(0): Detected total video RAM=524288K, accessible=262144K (PCI BAR=262144K)
(II) RADEON(0): Output VGA-0 connected
(II) RADEON(0): Output HDMI-0 disconnected
(II) RADEON(0): Output DVI-0 disconnected

So, aside from the oddness of having 512MB present and only half of that accessible, it looks OK. KDE4 from ports is still compiling, so I can't comment on any 3D or compositing features.

One little bit of coolness I hadn't expected is this, from dmesg:

hdac1: mem 0xdffec000-0xdffeffff irq 19 at device 0.1 on pci2

So presumably the audio via HDMI will work as well. No way to test, as I don't have anything to plug into that.

I should note, too, that running twm and xterm and Qt4 VirtualBox and then running Ubuntu 8.10 with GNOME inside that looks .. decidedly strange. Time traveling desktops.