Chapter 5. The X Window System

The graphics/drm-kmod package indirectly provides a range of kernel modules for use with Intel® Graphics. Recent versions of these modules can be used in conjunction with other graphics processors in PRIME with no special configuration.

The Intel® Graphics driver can be installed by executing the following command:

Then add the module to /etc/rc.conf file, by executing the following command:

The graphics/drm-kmod package indirectly provides kernel modules for a range of AMD® Graphics processors. The modules amdgpu or radeonkms can be used depending the generation of the hardware. The FreeBSD project maintains a AMD graphics support matrix showing support levels and to determine which driver must be used.

The AMD® Graphics drivers can be installed by executing the following command:

Enable the current module by adding it to the /etc/rc.conf file, executing the following command:

For older graphics (pre-HD7000/Tahiti), instead enable the legacy module by adding it to the /etc/rc.conf file, executing the following command:

NVIDIA® produces standalone or discrete graphics processors, and provides a proprietary driver for FreeBSD. The FreeBSD Ports Collection provides over a decade of drivers for supporting generations of NVIDIA graphics.

Administrators should install the latest driver supported by their hardware.

The following table shows the port containing the driver, the kernel module recommended for loading, and a link to the list of hardware supported by that driver:

The latest NVIDIA® Graphics driver can be installed by running the following command:

To enable the driver, add the module to /etc/rc.conf file, by executing the following command:

This is the direct rendering KMS driver.

Kernel modesetting is the option to set the graphics mode in the kernel. Enable it for subsequent boots with the following loader.conf(5) tunable:

Both PRIME and Wayland require kernel modesetting.

Prior versions of the driver do not support Direct Rendering. Instead use the modesetting module, by executing the following command:

If requiring Nvidia drivers prior to 390, note that they do not support kernel modesetting, and thus they must be used with the legacy sc(4) console driver, and a x11/xorg-server version prior to 1.20.

Enable them in /etc/rc.conf with the following command:

Historically, the X.org server was configured with files in /usr/local/etc/X11/. This is still supported for edge cases, but conflicts with dynamic autoconfiguration.

Do not create configuration for the X.org server in xorg.conf or run Xorg -configure unless automatic configuration fails.

X.org server looks in several directories for configuration files. /usr/local/etc/X11/ is the recommended directory for these files on FreeBSD. Using this directory helps keep application files separate from operating system files.

It is easier to use multiple files that each configure a specific setting than the traditional single xorg.conf. These files are stored in the /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ subdirectory.

Direct rendering provides the ability to seamlessly use a discrete graphics processor (dGPU) alongside an integrated graphics processor (iGPU), called PRIME. The drivers will automatically offload intensive tasks to the dGPU when required, and power it down when able.

To launch applications on the more powerful GPU in PRIME, use the DRI_PRIME=1 enviroment variable.

If multiple graphics drivers are conflicting, the driver for the graphics processor can be specified in the /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ directory.

To configure the Intel® driver in a configuration file:

To configure the AMD® driver in a configuration file:

To configure the NVIDIA® driver in a configuration file:

To configure the SCFB driver in a configuration file:

To configure the VESA driver in a configuration file:

To configure multiple graphics processors, the BusID can be added. A list of graphics processor bus IDs can be displayed by executing:

The output should be similar to the following:

Almost all monitors support the Extended Display Identification Data standard (EDID). X.org uses EDID to communicate with the monitor and detect the supported resolutions and refresh rates. Then it selects the most appropriate combination of settings to use with that monitor.

Other resolutions supported by the monitor can be selected atomically after the X server has been started with xrandr(1), or in the X.org server configuration files.

The X.org server provides the x11/libinput library, a cross-platform effort to support all touch, pointing, and keyboard devices under a unified library. Unless specified otherwise, this is loaded automatically.

Individual device settings for libinput(4) can be tuned in your desktop’s GUI, or manually with xinput and setxkbmap.

Alternatively, there are older, lightweight, individual drivers for specific input devices available in the x11-drivers catagory named x11/xf86-input-[foo]. This approach requires manual configuration of the X.org server. Both are described in this subsection.

X.org has built in support for rendering TrueType® fonts. There are two different modules that can enable this functionality. The freetype module is used in this example because it is more consistent with the other font rendering back-ends. To enable the freetype module just add the following line to the "Module" section of /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/90-fonts.conf.

Now make a directory for the TrueType® fonts (for example, /usr/local/share/fonts/TrueType) and copy all of the TrueType® fonts into this directory. Keep in mind that TrueType® fonts cannot be directly taken from an Apple® Mac®; they must be in UNIX®/MS-DOS®/Windows® format for use by X.org. Once the files have been copied into this directory, use mkfontscale to create a fonts.dir, so that the X font renderer knows that these new files have been installed. mkfontscale can be installed as a package:

Then create an index of X font files in a directory:

Now add the TrueType® directory to the font path. This is just the same as described in Type1 Fonts:

or add a FontPath line to xorg.conf.

Now Gimp, LibreOffice, and all of the other X applications should now recognize the installed TrueType® fonts. Extremely small fonts (as with text in a high resolution display on a web page) and extremely large fonts (within LibreOffice) will look much better now.

The URW font collection (x11-fonts/urwfonts) includes high quality versions of standard type1 fonts (Times Roman™, Helvetica™, Palatino™ and others). The Freefonts collection (x11-fonts/freefonts) includes many more fonts, but most of them are intended for use in graphics software such as the Gimp, and are not complete enough to serve as screen fonts.

To install the above Type1 font collections from binary packages, run the following commands:

And likewise with the freefont or other collections. To have a manually configured X server detect these fonts, add an appropriate line to the X server configuration file (/usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/90-fonts.conf), which reads:

Alternatively, at the command line in the X session run:

This will work but will be lost when the X session is closed, unless it is added to the startup file (~/.xinitrc for a normal startx session, or ~/.xsession when logging in through a graphical login manager like XDM). A third way is to use the new /usr/local/etc/fonts/local.conf as demonstrated in Anti-Aliased Fonts.

All fonts in X.org that are found in /usr/local/share/fonts/ and ~/.fonts/ are automatically made available for anti-aliasing to Xft-aware applications. Most recent applications are Xft-aware, including KDE, GNOME, and Firefox.

To control which fonts are anti-aliased, or to configure anti-aliasing properties, create (or edit, if it already exists) the file /usr/local/etc/fonts/local.conf. Several advanced features of the Xft font system can be tuned using this file; this section describes only some simple possibilities. For more details, please see fonts-conf(5).

This file must be in XML format. Pay careful attention to case, and make sure all tags are properly closed. The file begins with the usual XML header followed by a DOCTYPE definition, and then the <fontconfig> tag:

As previously stated, all fonts in /usr/local/share/fonts/ as well as ~/.fonts/ are already made available to Xft-aware applications. To add another directory outside of these two directory trees, add a line like this to /usr/local/etc/fonts/local.conf:

After adding new fonts, and especially new font directories, rebuild the font caches:

Anti-aliasing makes borders slightly fuzzy, which makes very small text more readable and removes "staircases" from large text, but can cause eyestrain if applied to normal text. To exclude font sizes smaller than 14 point from anti-aliasing, include these lines:

Spacing for some monospaced fonts might also be inappropriate with anti-aliasing. This seems to be an issue with KDE, in particular. One possible fix is to force the spacing for such fonts to be 100. Add these lines:

(this aliases the other common names for fixed fonts as "mono"), and then add:

Certain fonts, such as Helvetica, may have a problem when anti-aliased. Usually this manifests itself as a font that seems cut in half vertically. At worst, it may cause applications to crash. To avoid this, consider adding the following to local.conf:

After editing local.conf, make certain to end the file with the </fontconfig> tag. Not doing this will cause changes to be ignored.

Users can add personalized settings by creating their own ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf. This file uses the same XML format described above.

One last point: with an LCD screen, sub-pixel sampling may be desired. This basically treats the (horizontally separated) red, green and blue components separately to improve the horizontal resolution; the results can be dramatic. To enable this, add the line somewhere in local.conf: