ChaosBSD: a FreeBSD fork to serve as a driver testing ground

https://www.osnews.com/story/144210/chaosbsd-a-freebsd-fork-to-serve-as-a-driver-testing-ground/

Thom Holwerda Jan 17, 2026 · 1 min read
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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 GitHub page

This is an excellent approach to testing drivers that simply aren’t even remotely ready to be included in FreeBSD-proper. It should be obvious that this is not, in any way, meant to be used as a production operating system, as it will contain things that are broken and incomplete on purpose. The name’s also pretty great.