Displayport 1.2 (MST) graphics card on FreeBSD that actually works?

[fmatthew5876]

I'm having a hell of a time with getting a working graphics card on FreeBSD 11.1. I don't want to play video games or do anything heavy like that. I just need something reliable and low power that can do displayport 1.2 with the MST (multi-streaming technology) feature to power 2 screens with 1 cable.

Right now I'm using nvidia, but the binary nvidia driver has all sorts of problems with UEFI. If I ever try to switch from X to console, I'm stuck with a black screen forever and have to force a reboot. Sometimes my DisplayPort kvm misbehaves with it and I also get a black screen, forcing reboot again. I and many others have reported these issues for a long time and it doesn't look like nvidia really cares to fix their broken drivers.

The other side is the open source amd radeon driver. The problem there is it only supports old cards. I'm also afraid to drop $100 on a new amd video card just to find out MST isn't supported or some other unexpected problem with the open source driver.

The graphics situation in FreeBSD right now in 2017 is abysmal. Of course most people are probably running headless. If you are using graphics and X in FreeBSD, what hardware works for you?

Thanks!

 

[Patriot]

MST support might be a bigger ask than you think.... 2 DP outs might be a lot easier to find.
Easier to find more DP out on AMD cards but MST support is sketchy on both sides... it really hasn't been widely used so support while listed probably hasn't been tested driver side.

So, will a card with 2 dp work or does this somehow not work with your setup?
and have you considered running freebsd in a vm?

 

[fmatthew5876]

2 dp outs is a no-go because I'm using a KVM to power 2 screens using a single cable over MST.

MST actually mostly works fine with the binary NVidia driver. I just have all of those other problems coming along with it.​

MST support might be a bigger ask than you think....

If that's really true then that's just sad.

and have you considered running freebsd in a vm?

I've thought about this a bit. I could pci passthrough my SAS HBA and run FreeBSD for zfs in a vm. Not only is that more complicated setup but I'm more concerned how it will affect zfs performance. In particular, ZFS wants to use all available memory for caching and if its running in a VM with a restricted memory budget it won't be able to do that.

 

[whitey]

Just a FYI, at least w/ vSphere when you do passthru/vt-D of a device you must allocate all memory so it's not a shuffle/shell game as bad as you might imagine. My AIO FreeNAS ZFS boxes tick along at a pretty dang good pace perf-wise so I wouldn't worry abt that soo much, maybe a 5% overhead. compared to native if that.