A new BSD on the block is ChaosBSD that intends to serve as a testing distribution for unfinished and broken drivers not suitable for upstreaming to FreeBSD proper.
ChaosBSD is a downstream fork of FreeBSD that is self-described as:
"A Driver Proving Ground
ChaosBSD is a fork of FreeBSD. It exists because upstream cannot, and should not, accept broken drivers, half-working hardware, vendor trash, or speculative hacks.
We can."
ChaosBSD aims to be an "abuse lab" for hardware, a staging ground for driver development and reverse engineering, a place for incomplete software implementations until mature for upstreaming, and focused on x86_64 hardware.
In essence ChaosBSD is akin to the Linux kernel’s staging ar…
A new BSD on the block is ChaosBSD that intends to serve as a testing distribution for unfinished and broken drivers not suitable for upstreaming to FreeBSD proper.
ChaosBSD is a downstream fork of FreeBSD that is self-described as:
"A Driver Proving Ground
ChaosBSD is a fork of FreeBSD. It exists because upstream cannot, and should not, accept broken drivers, half-working hardware, vendor trash, or speculative hacks.
We can."
ChaosBSD aims to be an "abuse lab" for hardware, a staging ground for driver development and reverse engineering, a place for incomplete software implementations until mature for upstreaming, and focused on x86_64 hardware.
In essence ChaosBSD is akin to the Linux kernel’s staging area where incomplete / not-yet-fully-integrated drivers can live before being promoted to upstream proper. Though in the case of ChaosBSD it sounds that they will accept drivers in much more rudimentary or even broken shape than the standards of the Linux kernel’s staging area.
Those curious about ChaosBSD as this driver testing area / playground for FreeBSD can see the current code via GitHub.