FreeBSD 14 Nears Release With Support For Up To 1024 CPU Cores, Updated Drivers

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FreeBSD has been powering my admittedly very low end file server for a few years now. But, its lack of driver support for recent desktop/laptop hardware is pretty evident that most of its moneyed backers seem to be only interested in its server capabilities. Those are robust, while its desktop oriented hardware support is anemic. I was going to set up a FreeBSD workstation earlier this year, but realized that it would be impossible in my circumstance because FreeBSD lacked support for the AC WIFI (v13 doesn't support AC/AX protocol at all) chip on the motherboard nor does its Linux-based AMD GPU driver support the barely year-old video card (yet). I'm not alleging FreeBSD core/Foundation is letting moneyed interests influence its decisions. Rather, moneyed corporations are paying developers to support their interests as their day jobs so that work moves and integrated considerably faster than poor Joe who only works on hardware he has direct access to out of pocket and on his own time. Money is the grease that lubricates the skids.

The problem here is that both Wifi and graphics support have huge stacks of infrastructure that needs to be implemented before individual drivers. Devices related to server functionality tend to be isolated, or have lots of infrastructure already.

Think of it as having to implement a new Ethernet driver but the caveat is that you have to write the TCP/IP/UDP stack, too. Lots of infrastructure and the actual driver is a trivial component. The equivalent is what both Wifi and graphics are facing.

For the record, FreeBSD supports wifi ac cards, they just don't run at ac speed.

[ppcorp]

I was a hardcore BSD fan since 386BSD, but reality kicked in 10 years ago and I have been using Ubuntu since. Believe me, it was a tough pill to swallow

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I was a hardcore BSD fan since 386BSD, but reality kicked in 10 years ago and I have been using Ubuntu since. Believe me, it was a tough pill to swallow

Well, Ubuntu used to be more attractive (to me) than it is now. Now you have systemd and snaps and whatnot.

[dragon321]

Do you really not know the joke?

My bad, I forgot about this.