BSD on HP Spectre x360

Updated 2016-08-09 Tagged hardware bsd linux

Current employment contract gives me an HP Spectre x360. It has an Intel i7 and came with Windows 8.1 installed.

Windows was promptly removed. DragonflyBSD would have been my OS of choice but it lacks ports for VirtualBox which I need at the moment. Debian ran fine except for some minor things (never once shutdown cleanly and just general systemd stupidness).

Recently FreeBSD gurus have started work on updated Intel i915 support so this is what I am running now.

Here are some things to note:

Specs

Intel i7
Intel Wireless 7265
Intel HD Graphics 5500
Intel Broadwell-U Audio Controller
RTS5227 PCI Express Card Reader

Networking

It has a USB dongle for ethernet which worked without issue. For wireless the iwm driver seems to be fine with the correct firmware loaded in /boot/loader.conf, though test it first:

if_iwm_load="YES"
iwm7265fw_load="YES"

Graphics

FreeBSD’s i915 support is a little old in STABLE so I am running a 12-CURRENT world with a kernel based on https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics/tree/drm-next-4.6 which run quite well considering it is the bleeding edge.

Audio

The ACPI seems to follow a load path for Windows 2012 or 2013 so these need to be disabled in your /boot/loader.conf:

hw.acpi.remove_interface="Windows 2012,Windows 2013"

I then had to reboot twice to get the analog audio device to be recognised.

The equivalent in Debian was an addition to the kernel parameter in Grub:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet acpi_osi='!Windows 2013' acpi_osi='!Windows 2012'"

Touchpad

Enable synaptics support in /boot/loader.conf:

hw.psm.synaptics_support="1"

The touch pad is too big so I get palm-ing issues which are annoying. Synclient cannot be used with this new driver yet so will need another solution.

Touchscreen

Untested

Bluetooth

Untested