Following [1]AMD and FreeBSD Foundation collaborations and [2]the Sovereign Tech Fund making a big investment into FreeBSD, the FreeBSD Foundation and Quantum Leap Research have announced a $750,000 USD commitment to improve laptop support on this BSD operating system with backing by Dell, AMD, and Framework Computer.

While FreeBSD is popular on servers, the hope moving forward is seeing better FreeBSD support on laptops to help with corporate adoption and the like. Besides Quantum Leap Research and the FreeBSD Foundation, Dell, AMD, and Framework Computer are other stakeholders. The total project investment may hit $1 million USD.

[3]

Among the areas that will be worked on to enhance FreeBSD laptop support include better WiFi/wireless chipset support, enhancing power management with features like s2idle/s0ix, better Intel and AMD graphics driver support, audio improvements, and working on various laptop-specific hardware features. Laptop features like touchpad support, specialty buttons, and other capabilities found with modern laptops.

Also to be addressed as part of this project is making the FreeBSD scheduler better handle heterogeneous cores and improving the Bhyve hypervisor.

More details on this big investment into bettering laptop support on FreeBSD can be found via the [4]FreeBSD Foundation blog .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Q2-2024-Improvements

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sovereign-Tech-Fund-FreeBSD

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2024&image=laptops_lrg

[4] https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/why-laptop-support-why-now-freebsds-strategic-move-toward-broader-adoption/