Recently, the FreeBSD Foundation has been making progress on improving the operating system's support for modern laptop hardware. The foundation is now looking to expand testing to encompass a wider range of hardware; it has announced a laptop integration testing project to allow the community to easily test FreeBSD's compatibility with laptops and submit the results.

With limited access to testing systems, there's only so much we can do! We hope to work together with volunteers from the community who want FreeBSD to work well on their laptops.

While we expect device hardware and software enumeration to be a fully automated process, we feel that manually-submitted comments about personal experience with FreeBSD are equally valuable. We plan to highlight this commentary on our "matrix of compatibility" webpage for each tested laptop.

We are striving to make it as easy as possible to submit your results. You won't have to worry about environment setup, submission formatting, or any repo-specific details!

See the project repository and testing instructions for more.

The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is a widely misunderstood piece of hardware (or firmware) that lives in most x86-based computers. At SCALE 23x in Pasadena, California, James Bottomley gave a presentation on the TPM and the work that he and others have done to enable the Linux kernel to work with it. In particular, he described the problems with interposer attacks, which target the communication between the TPM and the kernel, and what has been added to the kernel to thwart them.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.6.133 stable kernel. This reverts a backporting mistake that removed file descriptor checks which led to kernel panics if the fgetxattr, flistxattr, fremovexattr, or fsetxattr functions were called from user space with a file descriptor that did not reference an open file.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (freerdp, grafana, grafana-pcp, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good, and gstreamer1-plugins-ugly-free, kernel, libpng12, libpng15, perl-YAML-Syck, python3, and rsync), Debian (dovecot, libxml-parser-perl, pyasn1, python-tornado, roundcube, tor, trafficserver, and valkey), Fedora (bind9-next, chromium, cmake, domoticz, freerdp, giflib, gst-devtools, gst-editing-services, gstreamer1, gstreamer1-doc, gstreamer1-plugin-libav, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good, gstreamer1-plugins-ugly-free, gstreamer1-rtsp-server, gstreamer1-vaapi, libgsasl, libinput, libopenmpt, mapserver, mingw-binutils, mingw-gstreamer1, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-base, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-good, mingw-libpng, mingw-python3, nginx-mod-modsecurity, openbao, python-gstreamer1, python3.12, python3.13, python3.14, python3.9, rust, rust-sccache, tcpflow, and vim), Red Hat (ncurses), Slackware (infozip and krita), SUSE (chromium, corosync, keybase-client, libinput-devel, osslsigncode, python-pillow, python311-Flask-Cors, python313, and python314), and Ubuntu (libarchive and spip).

Linus has released 7.0-rc7 for testing. "Things look set for a final release next weekend, but please keep testing. The Easter bunny is watching".