First Look: FreeBSD 9.0 On Intel Sandy Bridge Article

When recently having a ZaReason notebook in the office for Linux testing, the release candidate of PC-BSD/FreeBSD 9.0 was tested on this Intel Core i7 "Sandy Bridge" notebook and its performance compared to Ubuntu 11.10.

While lots of Sandy Bridge hardware has been around at Phoronix, getting FreeBSD to work on the latest-generation Intel platform has been a nuisance. For systems with Intel HD 2000/3000 Sandy Bridge graphics, there is not any mainline support. There has been the effort to port the Intel KMS/DRM Linux driver to the FreeBSD kernel along with providing user-space xf86-video-intel support, with targeting Sandy Bridge BSD enablement, but that is still a work in progress. The Intel KMS support probably will not land until FreeBSD 10.0. Even loading the VESA driver with Sandy Bridge can be troublesome. As I reported in August, Sandy Bridge on BSD is largely a mess. When ignoring the graphics, I have had Intel SNB systems that would hang on booting the FreeBSD kernel due to the Firewire controller. There have also been UEFI issues with booting FreeBSD 9.0 development installations... Phoronix