FreeBSD Foundation Announces New Project

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Konstantin Belousov has been awarded a grant to implement support of GEM, KMS, and DRI for Intel Drivers. This project is being co-sponsored by iXsystems.

The project is to implement GEM, port KMS, and write new DRI drivers for Intel Graphics, including the latest Sandy Bridge generation of integrated graphic units. The work should allow the latest Intel open-source driver to run on FreeBSD, expanding the range of hardware where FreeBSD is suitable for the desktop.

"The Foundation's sponsored project will allow me to spend much more time on this interesting work, and hopefully resolve the big issue for continuing use of FreeBSD on the desktop," said Konstantine.

"Adding support for GEM/KMS will allow both FreeBSD and PC-BSD to run with enhanced native graphic support on forthcoming advanced architectures with integrated, 3d accelerated graphical capabilities," says Matt Olander, Chief Technology Officer at iXsystems, Inc. "FreeBSD has long been dominant in the server market and this is one more step towards making FreeBSD a complete platform for netbooks, laptops, desktops, and servers. We are very pleased to be a part of this project."

Konstantine is a software developer, living in Kiev, Ukraine. He was given a src commit bit in 2006, and since then has spent most of his free time on the OS, making bug fixes and implementing things he considers interesting. He currently is also serving the project as release engineer and core team member.