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⇱ ChaosBSD Is A New BSD For "Broken Drivers, Half-Working Hardware, Vendor Trash" Test Bed - Phoronix


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ChaosBSD Is A New BSD For "Broken Drivers, Half-Working Hardware, Vendor Trash" Test Bed

Written by Michael Larabel in BSD on 18 January 2026 at 05:59 AM EST. 20 Comments
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.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.