Over the past number of months there has been an effort underway to improve FreeBSD laptop support with financial backing by Dell, AMD, and Framework among others. This has resulted in power management improvements, increasing the focus on WiFi driver support for FreeBSD, and related areas to make FreeBSD on laptops more appealing and relevant in 2025.
In cooperation with the FreeBSD Foundation, the February 2025 progress report is now available for increasing the usability of FreeBSD on laptops.
Over the prior month some of the work has included a new “acpi_spmc” power management driver for sleep modes using s0ix / s2idle low power states, better WiFi 4 (802.11n) and WiFi 5 (802.11ac) support using the Intel IWLWIFI driver with AX2xx / BExxx chipsets, and improving Linux WiFi driver compatibility.
As part of broadening the wireless/WiFi hardware driver support, the Linux KPI kernel programming interface has been seeing work to enhance the ability for Linux WiFi drivers to work on FreeBSD systems.
More details on these recent FreeBSD laptop support improvements via the FreeBSD Foundation blog.
