In a stunning development, the FreeBSD Foundation announces a $750,000 investment in laptop support. In collaboration with its hardware partner Quantum Leap Research, as well as AMD, Dell and Framework, the investment even climbs to a million dollars.
« While FreeBSD excels in server and embedded environments, its laptop support lags, particularly in essential areas like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, suspend/resume, digital microphones, hardware buttons for audio controls and input/output », Indicates the press release, published Friday.
Several priority areas have been identified: everything related to wireless, power management, graphics card support, audio improvements (routing, headset switching, etc.), and finally support for special buttons, including the touchpad.
In addition to these areas, which the foundation places in the “quality of life” category, FreeBSD must also improve its scheduler to support heterogeneous cores. This is a characteristic of modern processors, which mix high-performance cores with others, slower, but much more energy efficient.
FreeBSD must become a viable alternative to Windows and Linux on this type of machine, insists the foundation. She even mentions “ a strategic imperative » to lead to wider adoption of FreeBSD. “ Improving laptop support will encourage more developers to adopt FreeBSD as their primary operating system, leading to larger contributions to the project and fostering ecosystem growth », Adds the foundation.
