By admin 
Alfonso Siciliano, who has been one of the FreeBSD developers leading the effort on adding a KDE-based desktop option to the FreeBSD installer, provided an update on recent work around adding integrating this desktop option.
Following integration work already accomplished in May for being able to provide automatic GPU detection for Intel and AMD graphics hardware based on pciconf and fwget data, the attention more recently has turned to properly handling the NVIDIA FreeBSD driver support. In particular, due to the official NVIDIA FreeBSD drivers having different driver branches from NVIDIA for the legacy driver support, it’s not trivial to handle driver selection on the NVIDIA side if wanting to maintain legacy GPU hardware support.
Alfonso has been working to provide automatic NVIDIA GPU detection based on the supported chipsets listings from NVIDIA. But there has also been the NVIDIA driver licensing matters that have yet to be fully vetted too. Alfonso explained today in his June update on the project:
“During the month of June, I was primarily focused on BSDCan.
During my talk at the conference, I presented a solution for automatically detecting the appropriate NVIDIA GPU driver, allowing the installer to automatically detect the hardware, install the correct driver, and configure the system.
However, the licensing issue has not yet been clarified, so this solution will not be integrated into bsdinstall in the short term. Instead, users with NVIDIA GPUs will be prompted through a menu to select which version of the NVIDIA device driver they want to install.”
The current hope is that the FreeBSD desktop install option will be ready to go for the FreeBSD 15.2 release. FreeBSD 15.2 is working toward a stable release in December.