Laptop Freebsd

I moved my Dell laptop from Devuan Linux to FreeBSD and here are some things I needed to do and some things I did for convenience….

I found the basic install of the recommended drm-kmod package and i915kms driver wouldn't work - it crashed/hung during boot.

Removing this package and using the SCFB video driver worked, but didn't give (for example) DPMS control of the LCD screen.

I used SCFB temporarily be adding an xorg conf file 20-vesa.conf to /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/

Section "Device"
        Identifier "Card0"
        Driver "scfb"
EndSection

This was a reasonable workaround, but I found the solution to using correct Intel i915kms driver here : https://blog.hofstede.it/freebsd-150-on-the-thinkpad-t480-efficient-stable-and-8-hours-on-battery/

This is what worked:

drm-latest-kmod

gpu-firmware-intel-kmod-kabylake

kld_list="i915kms"

# Graphics and power tuning
i915kms_load="YES"
drm.i915.enable_rc6=7
drm.i915.enable_fbc=1
drm.i915.lvds_downclock=1
drm.i915.enable_psr=1
compat.linuxkpi.i915_disable_power_well="0"

i915kms now loads and I have access to DPMS for turning off the LCD screen.

I made a few small shell scripts to assist in controlling the battery consumption by being able to alter LCD brightness, and turn the LCD off via DPMS and makde i3 shorcuts to them.

(later I made the same key actions for DWM when I moved back to using DWM)

now I can “$mod+Shift+o” to reduce brightness and “$mod+Shift+p” to increase it, and “$mod+Shift+i” to turn the LCD screen off completely.

I also added a devd rule to turn the LCD screen off when the lid is closed - this confused me initially, as it worked when testing it by adding the rule, restarting devd and testing, from within an X-Session…. but didn't work when devd was started during bootup…

This was due to the lack of DISPLAY if the script was triggered from “outside” the X session. Changing the script to set the DISPLAY variable was the solution.

notify 20 {
match "system" "ACPI";
match "subsystem" "Lid";
match "notify" "0x01";
action "/home/g4slv/bin/on";
};
notify 20 {
match "system" "ACPI";
match "subsystem" "Lid";
match "notify" "0x00";
action "/home/g4slv/bin/off";
};

The lid actions call one of these →

~/bin/on

#!/usr/local/bin/bash
 
su g4slv -c 'setenv DISPLAY :0.0 && /usr/local/bin/xset dpms force on'

~/bin/off

#!/usr/local/bin/bash
 
su g4slv -c 'setenv DISPLAY :0.0 && /usr/local/bin/xset dpms force off'

Other tweaks

Small scripts to automate swithing between Wifi and Ethernet

#!/bin/sh
 
doas service netif stop em0 
doas service netif start wlan0
doas service dhclient restart wlan0

#!/bin/sh
 
doas service netif stop wlan0 
doas service netif start em0
doas service dhclient restart em0

hostname="proton"
keymap="uk.kbd"
#wlans_iwlwifi0="wlan0"
wlans_iwm0="wlan0"
ifconfig_wlan0="WPA  DHCP"
ip6addrctl_enable="NO"
ipv6_activate_all_interfaces="NO"
ifconfig_wlan0_ipv6="inet6 ifdisabled"
ifconfig_em0_ipv6="inet6 ifdisabled"
ifconfig_lo0_ipv6="inet6 ifdisabled"
#ifconfig_wlan0_ipv6="inet6 accept_rtadv"
create_args_wlan0="country GB regdomain NONE"
sshd_enable="YES"
sshd_flags="-4"

ntpd_enable="YES"
ntpd_sync_on_start="YES"
ntpd_flags="-4"

ftpd_enable="YES"
ftpd_flags="-4"


moused_nondefault_enable="NO"
# Set dumpdev to "AUTO" to enable crash dumps, "NO" to disable
dumpdev="AUTO"
zfs_enable="YES"
cupsd_enable="YES"
devfs_system_ruleset="system"
dbus_enable="YES"


avahi_daemon_enable="YES"

avahi_dnsconfd_enable="YES"
inetd_enable="YES"
rwhod_enable="YES"

kld_list="i915kms"
#kld_list="${kld_list} if_iwlwifi"


powerd_enable="YES"
powerd_flags="-a adaptive -b minimum "
update_motd="NO"
dynamic_motd="YES"
ifconfig_em0="DHCP"
autofs_enable="YES"

kern.geom.label.disk_ident.enable="0"
kern.geom.label.gptid.enable="0"
zfs_load="YES"
i915kms_load="YES"
drm.i915.enable_rc6="7"
drm.i915.semaphores="1"
drm.i915.enable_fbc="1"
drm.i915.lvds_downclock=1
drm.i915.enable_psr=1
compat.linuxkpi.i915_disable_power_well="0"
fuse_load="YES"
iwm8265fw_load="YES"

Page created : 04/06/26 11:04 BST

Page updated : 04/06/26 11:26 BST