proj-laptop

FreeBSD Foundation Laptop Update - April 2026

NOTE: For more details on any item, please visit the GitHub links provided, these contain more detail and links to relevant materials such as code commits.

New in April

Added to the project board

Bluetooth UX: testing and improvements

We’ve split out Bluetooth UX testing and improvements into its own task so we can make progress on this without being dependent on changes to the underlying stack.

GitHub issue #113

Completed in April

System Management

Improvements to Pkgbasify

Pkgbasify - a tool that lets you convert your installed FreeBSD system to use pkgbase to manage packages - now benefits from some improvements that are available in v2.7 of pkg. The improvements are mainly “under the hood” but use a much safer and more efficient mechanism.

GitHub issue #91

In Review

Graphics

Port of the Linux 6.12 Graphics Drivers

Work on porting the Linux DRM 6.12 graphics driver is complete. The code has been merged into the drm-kmod master branch and available to compile at from 6.12.85 onwards (the built version will be available in the Ports Collection in the near future). The corresponding changes to FreeBSD base system are also available in stable/15 in time for the 15.1 release.

NOTE: This is an important milestone as 6.12 is a LTS version of Linux.

GitHub issue #41

Power

S0i3 Modern Standby

Patches for S0ix states are in review. Good progress is also being made with debugging and suspend and resume is now functioning on laptops with AMD and Intel processors. Early assessment of power saving is around 45% on the Intel Framework laptop, likely due to the screen being off. The CPU may not be entering a low power state and so debugging continues. There are still challenges with managing suspend for individual parts of the laptop (device states), specifically for NVMe drives and this is a key focus for achieving suspend to idle states.

GitHub issue #32

Power consumption management tooling

Key drivers that will work with power-monitoring tool, Perfetto (an in-progress port), are in review. This includes a driver for Intel rapl which reports on core and system power usage and has potential to be used for more than just an input to Perfetto.

GitHub issue #6

Debugging tools for low power states

The changes needed to be able to debug FreeBSD during boot load via a USB port are in review. This will support developers as they work on developing FreeBSD’s ability to transition in and out of low power modes.

GitHub issue #38

Installation

KDE Desktop Installer Option

There are changes to the installer that will offer the user the option to install a graphical user environment, KDE. The required changes to bsdinstall are in review.

However, the script still needs to be updated because new NVIDIA drivers have been released. Therefore, in order to provide users with the best possible solution, it was decided to target STABLE 15.2 instead of 15.1 as previously stated.

GitHub issue: #25

In Progress

Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi 6 support

Tech debt work to enable Wi-Fi 6 is ongoing. Further discussions have been started on how to migrate to a native Wi-Fi solution (rather than Linux-based).

GitHub issue #34

Support for RealTek Wi-Fi cards

Delays caused by merging in changes from the upstream project, and subsequent new regression in rtw89 has meant that this work was not completed in time to go into 15.1 release.

GitHub issue #99

Support for Mediatek Wi-Fi cards

The driver has been updated to v7.0 and to include recent new changes to the upstream LinuxKPI project.

GitHub issue #66

Hardware

Webcam code donation from Dell

Still working on reorganizing it but some good progress this month. The code has been separated into uvc(4) and video(4) parts. It needs more cleanup and a review of the architecture. The goal is to finish that within Q2.

GitHub issue #39

Acknowledgements

The FreeBSD Foundation would like to extend its thanks to everyone who has contributed to this project, both this month and previously.

Thanks go out to:

Please refer to the README for more information about the FreeBSD Foundation’s Laptop Project.