This infodump tries to be an up-to-date place for information regarding FreeBSD Wayland desktop setup. It’s not a step-by-step guide but if you know the basics you should be able to figure everything out.

Base

My Base Fork: https://github.com/DankBSD/base

You probably don’t need all the things from there, stock -CURRENT is good for most people.

Ports

My Ports Fork: https://github.com/DankBSD/ports

Some port maintainers (hello x11@ gnome@) are kinda slow sometimes :) so I maintain a patchset for the ports repo that includes new shiny things.

It is sort of becoming a more proper “distro”/fork currently..

The most important things to get from my ports are:

• libepoll-shim (finally, updates are upstream)
• libudev-devd: git rev update - includes fixes for display hotplug and (see below) input device enumeration without root access (finally, updates are upstream)
• consolekit2: wayland support (see below)

GPU Kernel Drivers

The FreeBSDDesktop git repo is currently outdated, freebsd/drm-kmod currently has 5.3 and it’s in ports as drm-devel-kmod.

• YOU HAVE TO REBUILD AND REINSTALL EXTERNAL KERNEL MODULES LIKE THESE AFTER INSTALLING A NEW KERNEL! the behavior is UNDEFINED if you don’t, it might not break so hard that it doesn’t load, but it is VERY likely to break in SOME way!
  • when building a module, your /usr/src tree MUST match the kernel you WILL be loading the module into!!
• The first two Radeon GCN generations are supported by both amdgpu and radeonkms. Use amdgpu! It’s the modern driver, it supports everything needed for Vulkan and it doesn’t have weird crashes radeonkms sometimes can have.
• AMD Radeon (amdgpu) + UEFI very often has a framebuffer conflict problem, for a workaround disable efifb with hw.syscons.disable=1 in /boot/loader.conf and enjoy no display output until driver loads.
• Intel Kaby Lake doesn’t refresh the vt sometimes, disabling PSR (compat.linuxkpi.i915_enable_psr=0) seems to fix it.
• amdgpu works on aarch64 machines btw

GPU tunables/sysctls

Make sure the tunables you set actually exist! Sometimes you’ll find their old names in various blogs etc. — translate to the current format:

• Back in the day, driver tunables were drm.i915.TUNABLENAME or something.
• For a brief period, they were compat.linuxkpi.TUNABLENAME (e.g. compat.linuxkpi.ppfeaturemask).
• Currently, they are compat.linuxkpi.DRIVERNAME_TUNABLENAME (e.g. compat.linuxkpi.amdgpu_ppfeaturemask).

Other than driver tunables, there are tunables corresponding to Linux sysfs’s “classes”. These are under sys.class and they include laptop display backlight brightness (sys.class.backlight) on both Intel and AMD.

Anyway: DO NOT cargo-cult tunables from the internet :) Most of them are good by default. I pretty much only use these:

compat.linuxkpi.i915_enable_dc="7" # deepest power states
compat.linuxkpi.i915_enable_dpcd_backlight="1" # better brightness control on some modern laptops
# (the Pixelbook requires this and also some patching for backlight to work)
compat.linuxkpi.amdgpu_ppfeaturemask="4294803455" # default | 0x4000 for Overdrive overclocking

GPU Userspace Drivers (Mesa)

The mesa-libs/mesa-dri/clover/osmesa stuff in upstream ports is not a complete disaster (at least Wayland and Vulkan stuff is enabled out of the box now, though not VA-API it seems) but it’s still a bit outdated.

Now there’s mesa-devel in ports! But only with D25020 it will be easy to switch between GL implementations without rebuilding all the packages.

Input Device Support

The modern way of doing input is evdev. Forget moused, xf86-input-<ANYTHING that's not libinput>, etc. (tbh forget xorg also :D)

EVDEV_SUPPORT kernel option (to expose most things like psm as evdev) was enabled by default in rS340387 (Nov 2018).

It’s REALLY IMPORTANT to set sysctl kern.evdev.rcpt_mask="12" — send evdev events from individual mice/keyboards instead of sysmouse/kbdmux. (UPD: this is default in -CURRENT now!)

(UNLESS you have e.g. a MacBook with a USB touchpad — atp(4) doesn’t have evdev support yet. In that case, for now you can use moused. But someone should add the support!)

For PS/2 Synaptics touchpads, also set loader tunable hw.psm.synaptics_support="1" and hw.psm.trackpoint_support="1" for ThinkPad TrackPoints. (The TrackPoint will appear as an extra device in evdev!) (UPD: this is all enabled by default now in -CURRENT, hopefully won’t be rolled back.)

For HID over I²C install the wulf7/iichid driver. (well, it’s a next gen input stack really, that abstracts HID from USB. I contributed pen tablet support there!) (upd: It’s in ports now)

For Wacom tablets, gamepads, and other USB devices that Linux supports, you can use webcamd, which just runs the Linux drivers in userspace (and uses cuse to provide them to the kernel) which is pretty cool.

Cool evdev tools

• evemu provides lower-level (than libinput’s CLI) debug view, record and replay, etc
• evhz measures event rate
• netevent forwards devices over the network (like Synergy but without fancy seamless mouse handover, you have to press a hotkey to switch to remote)
• evscript I made this a while ago: a scripting thing to make xcape style key tricks happen. I don’t really use it anymore because I have a Wayfire plugin for that

Session Management

A session manager is a daemon that tracks user sessions (huh). This was originally invented for GUI user switching, but now it has a more fundamental task: letting you run your GUI session as your user account without needing root (this works by passing file descriptors to GPU and input devices over D-Bus). It also configures your $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR directory.

On Linux, systemd-logind or elogind is used for this. We only have the good old ConsoleKit2 for now. (I’d like to work on a new thing in Rust but I have so many projects already)

• included in my ports (also at D18754) is a patch for CK2 that enables FreeBSD+Wayland support, you need that;
• for wlroots-based compositors (display servers) like sway and wayfire, you need a CK2 support patch, it’s actually available in the wlroots port as the CONSOLEKIT option;
• some shenanigans related to our udev implementation not really being udev:
  • make sure the kernel exposes kern.evdev.input sysctls, if it doesn’t then it’s too old;
  • make sure libudev-devd is at least v0.4.1, i.e. it must include 8efdba3c;
• to enable automatic CK2 session creation on login, add session optional pam_ck_connector.so to the # session section of /etc/pam.d/login and log out and back in;
• you can always use ck-launch-session to start the compositor if the automatic PAM thing doesn’t work out.

Compositors / Display Servers

wlroots based compositors are the best supported (and these ones are in ports):

• Wayfire is a general extensible compositor with various Compiz features (wobbly windows, desktop cube) and stuff, I use it daily, it’s awesome;
• sway is an i3 (tiling WM) clone;
• hikari is inspired by cwm;
• cage is a kiosk (runs a single, maximized application) — like all wlr compositors it can be used in a window, so there’s some other usages for that;

If you have done the aforementioned CK2 setup, they should just work as your regular user.

My abandoned Weston fork is a thing also if you’re interested for some reason.

KDE Plasma 5 should be possible (already supported CK2!), here’s a patch attempt from some time ago, it got to the lock screen at least for me.

Power Management

Frequency Management

Most CPUs: run powerd++ (powerdxx in ports).

Current Intel CPUs (>=Skylake): the Intel Speed Shift patch which lets the CPU handle it has landed! If you have speed shift mentioned in your dmesg, your CPU is already adjusting everything dynamically.

(To clear any confusion: Speed Shift is on-CPU adjustment, SpeedStep is OS-driven adjustment that’s exposed as sysctls that powerd(++) touches.)

C-states

This is the most important thing for not eating power when idle.

Set sysctl hw.acpi.cpu.cx_lowest as low as it goes e.g. "C8". (Or economy_cx_lowest="Cmax" and performance_cx_lowest="Cmax" in /etc/rc.conf as a shortcut for that if not using runit or any other alternative init.)

On Intel CPUs, use pcm.x 1 (from intel-pcm) to check C-state residency and energy consumption. You want to be in C7 (both core and package) (or deeper if some chip does that) as much as possible when not doing anything.

Use vmstat -i to check interrupt rates. Some misbehaving devices (e.g. inactive USB Bluetooth on Intel Wi-Fi cards) can spew a lot of interrupts and waste power, disable them by running e.g. usbconfig -d 0.3 power_off.

More

There’s more power tips here (e.g. for SATA disks) but don’t copy all the GPU tunables :)

Various stuff

Extra /boot/loader.conf tweaks

vfs.zfs.arc_max="4G" # limit ZFS ARC size — generally it yields memory to userspace programs, but ehh
hw.nvme.use_nvd="0" # use CAM-based NVMe disk driver (default on powerpc64 and aarch64 already)
hw.usb.no_boot_wait="1" # don't waste time on probing USB at early boot time (don't enable when booting from USB)
kern.vt.splash_cpu="1" # remember penguins on console? that's orbs on console
kern.msgbufsize="512000" # more space for dmesg
kern.hwpmc.nsamples="8192" # more space for pmcstat
kern.hwpmc.nbuffers_pcpu="128" # more space for pmcstat

devd event rules

Restart devd to activate new rules!!

USB phone connection (vendor 0x18d1 is Google Nexus/Pixel) for running ADB, MTP fusefs-simple-mtpfs etc. as regular user:

notify 100 {
        match "system"          "USB";
        match "subsystem"       "DEVICE";
        match "type"            "ATTACH";
        match "vendor"          "0x18d1";
        action  "chgrp wheel /dev/$cdev; chmod g+rw /dev/$cdev";
};

U2F token: /usr/local/etc/devd/u2f.conf.sample was installed by package libu2f-host-1.1.4

Asetek liquid cooler for control scripts like leviathan, krakenx etc. (all the Python scripts “for Linux” that use Python USB libraries work on FreeBSD):

notify 100 {
        match "system"          "USB";
        match "subsystem"       "DEVICE";
        match "type"            "ATTACH";
        match "vendor"          "0x2433";
        action  "chgrp wheel /dev/$cdev; chmod g+rw /dev/$cdev";
};

Extra links/notes

AMD Ryzen CPUs: load amdtemp to read temperature (sysctl dev.cpu.0.temperature), BIOS overclocking works fine even though sysctl might show freq 2700 #218262, ignore that

USB keyboard/mouse multimedia keys: #222646 use iichid!

MSI desktop mainboard RGB lighting: msi-rgb

Bluetooth audio, fake microphone from audio files, etc.: audio/virtual_oss.