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FreeBSD Laptop Support Continues Improving With WiFi, GPU & Audio Driver Work

Written by Michael Larabel in BSD on 15 July 2026 at 05:56 AM EDT. Add A Comment

The FreeBSD Foundation's Laptop Support and Usability Project, which has received more than $750k USD in funding to improve the experience of FreeBSD on laptops, is out with its newest monthly progress report. A lot continues to happen for improving the FreeBSD laptop story, which in many aspects also benefits FreeBSD on the desktop too.

A big focus on the FreeBSD for laptops experience continues to be about enabling modern power management functionality such as for S0ix. That code continues progressing and addressing various dependencies along the way. Somewhat related is also the effort on enhancing the FreeBSD kernel scheduler to better cope with modern hybrid processor designs featuring a combination of performance and power-optimized cores. Among the goals on the power management side is for relevant laptop models on getting at least "the ability to actively use a FreeBSD laptop for 8 hours." Or a standard work day and in turn various other minor power issues have been uncovered in the process for extending laptop battery life on FreeBSD.

Updating their open-source graphics drivers that are derived from the Linux kernel source tree is another important area for benefiting both laptop and desktop use. FreeBSD developers have been working on porting the Linux 6.13 DRM state and is now under review. There is also a Linux 6.14 port that's been worked on as well. In turn their next milestone is moving to the Direct Rendering Manager state from the current Linux 6.18 LTS base.

Over on the wireless driver side, FreeBSD is now up to three drivers supporting WiFi 6 between the Intel IWLWIFI, Realtek RTW89, and MediaTek MT76.

On top of graphics and WiFi drivers, FreeBSD also continues enhancing its audio driver support too. June also saw some work started on leveraging GPIO interrupts for low-latency touchpad handling for better performance with some I2C-enabled laptop touchpads.

More details on the FreeBSD laptop usability work that was carried out in June can be found via the monthly status report.

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FreeBSD 16 Retires The Last Of Its GPL Code From Its Base System<br>FreeBSD Desktop Installer Option Working Through NVIDIA Driver Handling, Licensing<br>FreeBSD Updates Its Graphics Driver Port From Linux 6.12 LTS<br>FreeBSD 15.1 Released With Updated WiFi Drivers, Better C23 Support & Other Improvements<br>FreeBSD Receives Funding To Launch AI-Assisted Vulnerability Discovery<br>FreeBSD 15.1 Delayed To Mid-June Due To Critical x86 Bug Fixes

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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