FreeBSD Foundation Buying Newer Laptops To Help Improve Hardware Support

The FreeBSD Q3-2019 quarterly report is now available. One of the interesting bits from this report is the FreeBSD Foundation planning to buy one or more families of new laptops to supply to their core developers in working to improve the modern hardware support.

For working to improving the FreeBSD laptop support, what they came up with is, "The FreeBSD Foundation would like to ensure that running FreeBSD on contemporary hardware, including laptops, remains viable. To that end we plan to purchase the latest generation of one or more of a family of laptops preferred by members of the FreeBSD community, evaluate the existing state of hardware support, and implement missing hardware support where possible. As the first laptop for this project we have selected a 7th Generation Lenovo X1 Carbon."

Some of the other FreeBSD activities for Q3 included:

- FreeBSD developers and their Git Transition Working Group are still figuring out the logistics in migrating the FreeBSD sources from SVN to Git.

- Makefs now supports FAT file-system as needed for installations and virtual machine system images.

- Continued improvements to its dated FUSE support.

- The FreeBSD Foundation plans to purchase some newer hardware including laptops for developers for helping to improve the FreeBSD experience on their new hardware. The first laptop they bought for focusing on improving is the 7th Gen Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon.

- Intel contributed TPM2 software stack to FreeBSD Ports.

- Broadcom BCM5861X SoC support was added.

- Xfce 4.14 made it into ports.

More details in their quarterly status report at FreeBSD.org.