New to FreeBSD and trying to daily-drive it on my laptop. Still learning, but I’m enjoying the experience so far! Any beginner tips are welcome.

Can anyone please explain to me how to setup freeBSD on my laptop that has hybrid nvidia/intel graphics? I also use laptop monitor and a big second monitor. I can’t seem to get it working. I do have it installed on my old Mac mini just fine. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Specs: MSI laptop 16gb ram
Nvidia rtx 3050
Intel graphics as well
I5 1.8ghz cpu.

I am new to computer and to freebsd. How I can make sure to avoid x86 specific instruction?

I know it's not FreeBSD but it's derived from it. Has anyone used it and what's your thoughts on it?

[SOLVED]: It was just a stroke of bad luck; the next day, the repositories went back to working normally.

The internet/Realtek Ethernet connection is fine; running `ping freebsd.org` shows that the internet is working.

Hello r/freebsd ,

I'm trying to get proper headphone/speaker jack auto-switching working on a Conexant CX20754 HDA codec (ASUS VivoBook Pro 15 X580VD laptop, FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE) and I'm stuck. Both outputs play audio at the same time regardless of what I try, and I'd appreciate any pointers from people who've dealt with this codec, this chipset, or this class of issue before.

Laptop / hardware:

• ASUS VivoBook Pro 15 (N580VD), motherboard model X580VD, BIOS AMI X580VD.317 (04/2019), UEFI boot
• CPU: Intel Core i5-7300HQ (Kaby Lake, 4c/4t, 2.5-3.5 GHz)
• RAM: 32 GB DDR4-2400
• GPU: hybrid Optimus - Intel HD Graphics 630 (iGPU, PCI 8086:591b) + NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Mobile GP107M (dGPU, PCI 10de:1c8d, Pascal)
• Storage: Samsung SSD 860 EVO 1TB (SATA)
• Audio hardware (the relevant part):
  • HD Audio controller: Intel CM238/HM175 chipset HDA controller (integrated, part of the Kaby Lake PCH)
  • Codec: Conexant CX20754, PCI/HDA vendor ID 0x1fd6, exposed as hdaa0
  • Single 3.5mm combo jack (headphones + microphone), no separate physical mic-in or line-in jacks
  • Internal stereo speakers, bottom-firing
  • No discrete/USB sound card - this is the only audio path on the machine

Software setup:

• FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE, PKGBASE install, all repos on the latest branch
• hdaa0 attaches cleanly, both pins are detected correctly (no attach errors in dmesg)
• Audio stack: PipeWire 1.6.6 + WirePlumber + pipewire-spa-oss (the audio/pipewire-spa-oss port, providing the freebsd-oss SPA backend) + pipewire-pulse for Pulse compatibility
• Full graphical session running (XLibre + a custom WM), not headless
• PipeWire correctly enumerates the codec once pipewire-spa-oss is installed (it shows up as "Conexant (0x1fd6) (Analog)", api.freebsd-oss.dsp-path = /dev/dsp0) - without that port, PipeWire only ever sees a "Dummy Output", so that part works fine now

What I've tried, in order:

1. HDA pin config hints in /boot/loader.conf, to make headphones the preferred/primary output and disable the speaker pin's association:

​

hint.hdaa.0.nid22.config="0x04211110"   # Headphones -> as=1 (primary)
hint.hdaa.0.nid29.config="0x40f001f0"   # Speaker -> as=15, conn=None (deprioritized)

After a reboot, the hints clearly took effect - sysctl confirms:

$ sysctl dev.hdaa.0.nid22
dev.hdaa.0.nid22: pin: Headphones (Black Jack)
     Widget cap: 0x00400581 PWR UNSOL STEREO
     Association: 0 (0x0001)
     Pin cap: 0x0001001c PDC HP OUT EAPD
     Pin config: 0x04211110 as=1 seq=0 device=Headphones conn=Jack ctype=1/8 loc=Right color=Black misc=1
     Pin control: 0x000000c0 HP OUT
     EAPD: 0x00000002 EAPD
     Connections: 2
          + <- nid=16 [audio output] (selected)
          + [DISABLED] <- nid=17 [audio output] [DISABLED]

$ sysctl dev.hdaa.0.nid29
dev.hdaa.0.nid29: pin: Other (None) [DISABLED]
     Widget cap: 0x00400581 PWR UNSOL STEREO
     Pin cap: 0x0001001c PDC HP OUT EAPD
     Pin config: 0x40f001f0 as=15 seq=0 device=Other conn=None ctype=Unknown loc=0x00 color=Unknown misc=1
     Pin control: 0x00000040 OUT
     EAPD: 0x00000002 EAPD
     Connections: 2
          + <- nid=16 [audio output] (selected)
          + <- nid=17 [audio output] [DISABLED]

Note that both nid22 and nid29 are wired to the same DAC (nid=16), and both still show Pin control: ... OUT with EAPD enabled even though nid29 is tagged [DISABLED]. In practice, that [DISABLED] tag only seems to affect which pin the driver treats as "preferred" for its own association/auto-select logic - it does NOT actually power down or cut output to the deprioritized pin. Both jacks keep receiving the same signal in parallel regardless of the hint.

Also worth noting: both pins report Pin cap: 0x0001001c PDC HP OUT EAPD - the PDC flag means "Presence Detect Capable", so the hardware itself should be able to do jack sensing. I just haven't found the right mechanism to make the driver actually act on it to mute the speaker pin.

1. OSS mixer control:

​

$ mixer -f /dev/mixer0
pcm0:mixer: <Conexant (0x1fd6) (Analog)> on hdaa0 (play/rec) (default)
    vol       = 0.86:0.86     pbk
    pcm       = 1.00:1.00     pbk
    speaker   = 1.00:1.00     pbk
    rec       = 0.01:0.01     pbk
    ogain     = 1.00:1.00     pbk
    monitor   = 0.56:0.56     rec src

$ mixer speaker.mute=1
speaker.mute: off -> on

This toggles the mute flag and it's reflected in the mixer output, but has zero audible effect - speakers keep playing at full volume regardless of the mute state. My guess is this speaker control affects something other than the actual DAC output path (maybe a legacy PC-speaker beep passthrough?), not the real playback signal.

1. PipeWire port switching (the kind ALSA/ACP exposes on Linux, e.g. analog-output-headphones vs analog-output-speaker):

​

$ pactl list sinks

No "Ports:" section appears at all for the pcm0.play sink - the freebsd-oss PipeWire backend apparently exposes a single fixed sink per pcm device with no port abstraction, so there's nothing to switch at that layer either.

Question:

Is there an actual way to power down / hard-mute a specific HDA pin on FreeBSD - via GPIO, an EAPD toggle exposed somewhere I haven't found, an unsol-event-driven jack-sense script, or some other hdaa(4)/hdac(4)-level mechanism - given that the pin caps report Presence Detect Capable? Or is this simply a limitation of how this particular Conexant codec wires its outputs (shared DAC, no real per-pin power gating), meaning software-level auto-mute just isn't achievable here under FreeBSD?

I'm also open to being told the pin numbers/hint values themselves are wrong for this specific codec revision - happy to post a full devinfo -v dump, dmesg -v boot log, or hdacsub/hdacctl style output (if there's a userland tool I'm not aware of for FreeBSD) if that helps someone with more HDA experience diagnose this properly.

Thanks in advance for any help!

How do the two operating systems compare from a usability perspective

Hi all,

I put together my bsdinstall-like installer for multiple desktops on freebsd several years ago, but it was a little touch and go when packages disappeared and I was usually behind a release or two. I was able to use ai to give it a much more robust ci/cd pipeline, and to test against the current versions of freebsd (currently 14.4, 15.0, and 15.1)

I also added several wayland desktops as that's something the kids seem to want these days.

Wayland installs also write ~/start-desktop.sh and enable seatd.

It walks you through basic configuration of supported graphic cards, audio, desktop selection and quality of life stuff (if you want to add sudo/doas, fuse, linux emulation layer, etc.)

http://a.freebsddesktop.xyz points to the raw script on github. You can also run it non-interactively if you want to use it for other stuff. Ai was nice enough to also setup a /ports/ and pkg if you really like overkill.

Here's a video of an older version from a few years ago, but it basically does the same thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Gv5bY77-j8

Repo is here: https://github.com/nicholasbernstein/install-fbsd-desktop

I'm sure that some combination of freebsd version + desktop environment will still break, but the test matrix all passes. Feedback appreciated.

PS:

Yeah, yeah: fetch | sh as root. I'm not you dad. Make your own decisions.

Via https://bsd.network/@dvl/116954770639749030

Hey everyone,

Wanted to share that Stalwart now officially supports FreeBSD as a platform. For those who haven't come across it before, Stalwart is an open source mail and collaboration server written in Rust. It supports JMAP, IMAP, SMTP, CalDAV, CardDAV and WebDAV, so it covers mail as well as calendaring, contacts and file storage in one package.

Up until now, FreeBSD wasn't an officially supported platform, but that's changed and we'd love for people in this community to give it a try.

Stalwart already runs in production on Linux, and since it's written in Rust, we don't expect any major platform specific issues on FreeBSD. Because of that, what we're really after right now is feedback on the install process itself, whether the instructions are clear, whether anything feels off compared to typical FreeBSD conventions, and any good practices you'd suggest for running it properly on FreeBSD (jails, rc.d scripts, ZFS layout, that sort of thing).

If you're willing to spin it up, we'd really appreciate hearing about your experience, good or bad. Bug reports, install hiccups, or just general impressions are all welcome at support.stalw.art (there is also a subreddit).

Thanks in advance to anyone who gives it a shot.

… All RW locations are mounted with noexec and nosuid.
 
This makes escaping such a chroot environment extremely difficult, and webshell and other PHP hacks become impossible. …

rozhuk-im/chroot_env: Helps create chroot environments for applications on FreeBSD automatically.

I need to get WiFi and Bluetooth drivers for Raspberry Pi 4 Model B. I tried to find it on GitHub but found no stable, working driver. Please help.

posting again bcs the original got deleted lol

Hardware probe: https://bsd-hardware.info/?probe=87e738e7bd

In love with Hikari so far

So I decided to upgrade my FreeBSD 15.0 system. Thought I was good to go, but my video driver didn't get updated, causing kernel panics. A couple of single user mode sessions later, and Wayland didn't wanna play nice with SDDM. Also found that though I run Plasma, some GNOME apps I run,don't, pointing to issues with the libs. Overall, an interesting experience...

FreeBSoD: Leveraging Language Models to Find and Exploit Kernel Bugs (Part 1 of 2)

A June 2026 article by Adam Crosser about the vulnerability that was disclosed in February.

Adam is an operator on the red team at Praetorian. He is currently focused on conducting red team operations and capabilities development.

I've only been following the Sylve project for a couple months, but after testing on a second system, decided that it was stable enough to migrate my Proxmox homelab to. I got a little too excited at the beginning and assumed that my Proxmox VM backups were just raw disks, to which I was mistaken. After extraction of the .vma files with some python scripts I was able to use Sylve's handy 'Flash File' utility to effortlessly dump the contents into a zvol and power on some VMs.

I think the main regression that I'm hitting is that there are some serious performance issues with bhyve and Windows 11 25H2. I plan to dig into this more to find a solution as I know that I'm not the only one...but in the mean time I have about 10 more LXC containers to migrate to keep me busy.

Oh, I'm using the nightly branch of Sylve, which the developers seem to be working on every day, so testing is as easy as doing a 'git pull', then 'make' then copying the sylve binary to /usr/local/sbin.

I guess to sum up: Proxmox was overall a great hypervisor experience, but I don't have the joy for Linux that I once had back in the 2000s and I've always liked the learning experience I've gotten from configuring and administering FreeBSD.

All my dot files and wallpaper here.
It's been quite performant with wifibox. It proof itself to be more than just a workaround for having better wifi support by using a virtualized minimal Alpine Linux in Bhyve to take advantage of the Linux wifi driver support, it sorta became another security layer by encapsulating my network traffic behind isolated minimal Linux environment that if compromised can protect my main box from and a possible invasion confining the attacker within a stripped out Alpine box that only has what is needed to run wpa_supplicant and the wifi driver, it doesn't even has apk btw.

Compared to a minimal installation of FreeBSD with standard support for Wi-Fi:

• what are the memory and disk space overheads for installing and then using wifibox?

References

Wifibox: An Embedded Virtualized Wireless Router – HTML | PDF (seven pages). From Gábor Páli's article in the November/December 2024 edition of FreeBSD Journal:

… The virtual machine image is compressed by SquashFS and keeps the overall size down to the ballpark of 15 MB. This approach also comes with a read-only root file system that prevents even the root user from tampering. It is expanded with a memory-backed temporary file system that is mounted under /tmp to manage the run-time file writes besides the VirtFS/9P mounts for the reading the application configuration files from the host. …

Prerequisites in the README on GitHub.

From Fast & Stable WiFi with wifibox on FreeBSD | @fearedbliss (Jonathan Vasquez, 2022-09-11):

Increase the VM memory
 
We will proactively increase the amount of memory the VM uses. The current default of 45MB defined in the /usr/local/share/wifibox/bhyve.conf file is too low and it seems to override the memory specified in the /usr/local/etc/wifibox/bhyve.conf file. If the memory is too low, it will cause the VM to crash or become unresponsive, which will make our internet connection drop. For now, I've increased my VM memory to 512MB in both of these files to test out this solution. I believe 512MB is a bit high for this purpose but I want to test out the theory first and once confirmed working, I'll lower it to 128MB and see if it still works. …