freebsd announce - Feb 2011 - 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.

The FreeBSD Foundation