# Port of GEM and KMS

## Status

The latest drm code from FreeBSD 9.x current has been successfully imported into DragonFly BSD and tested with a Radeon HD 4550 on an x86_64 machine (Shuttle SG45H7).  However it must be remembered that testing has only been done with this one graphics card and it is completely unknown whether say an Intel machine will lock up solid.  Also nothing was done to port the extensive via drivers FreeBSD has already ported.

## Introduction or what the heck is being talked about

We are talking about modern graphics card drivers that have already or are in the process of being written for Linux.  Fortunately for the BSDs the source code that is the basis of these drivers, part hosted in git repositories accessible from [freedesktop.org](http://cgit.freedesktop.org/), and even the part that is now residing in the Linux kernel, is mostly licensed under terms compatible with the [MIT X License](http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php), and therefore can be directly ported to DragonFly.

When we refer to DRM, we are referring to the [Direct Render Manager](http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/DRM) that is a kernel module arbitrating requests for various graphics related services.  Because of this acronym, the source code for DragonFly's DRM module can be found in directory **sys/dev/drm**, while the source code for Linux'd DRM module has been split into **include/drm** hosting common header files and **drivers/gpu/drm**.  Furthermore the Linux files have had vendor specific code split off into their own separate directories.