I’ve been working on FreeBSD for Intel for almost 6 months now. In the world of programmers, I am considered an old dog, and these 6 months have been all about learning new tricks. Luckily, I’ve found myself in a remarkably inclusive and receptive community whose patience seems plentiful. As I get ready to take some time off for the holidays, and move into that retrospective time of year, I thought I’d beat the rush a bit and update on the progress

Earlier this year, I decided to move from architect of the Linux graphics driver into a more nebulous role of FreeBSD enabling. I was excited, but also uncertain if I was making the right decision.

Earlier this half, I decided some general work in power management was highly important and began working there. I attended BSDCam (handsome guy on the right), and led a session on Power Management. I was honored to be able to lead this kind of effort.

Earlier this quarter, I put the first round of my patches up for review, implementing suspend-to-idle. I have some rougher patches to handle s0ix support when suspending-to-idle. I gave a talk MeetBSD about our team’s work.

Earlier this month, I noticed that FreeBSD doesn’t have an implementation for Intel Speed Shift (HWPstates), and I started working on that.

Earlier this week, I was promoted from a lowly mentee committer to a full src committer.

Earlier today, I decided to relegate my Linux laptop to the role of my backup machine, and I am writing this from my Dell XPS13 running FreeBSD

vandamme 13.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 13.0-CURRENT #45 881fee072ff(hwp)-dirty: Mon Nov 19 16:19:32 PST 2018 bwidawsk@vandamme:/usr/home/bwidawsk/usr/obj/usr/home/bwidawsk/usr/src/amd64.amd64/sys/DEVMACHINE amd64

6 months later, I feel a lot less uncertain about making the right decision. In fact, I think both opportunities would be great, and I’m thankful this Thanksgiving that this is my life and career. I have more plans and things I want to get done. I’m looking forward to being thankful again next year.