So FreeBSD 14.3 released in early June, 2025. As with all software upgrades, I rarely install on day 1, or day 2 or week 1. Depending on what I am installing, I wait and monitor the internet for problems before pulling the trigger on the upgrade. I remember back in the day, there were OS upgrades for which was said "never upgrade to a .0 version of the operating system." I remember specifically that the rule of thumb for Solaris was that you never upgraded to an even-numbered version, e.g. 2.4, 2.6, etc...Kind of like how the odd-numbered Star Trek original cast movies were panned (though I quite enjoyed III).
So back to FreeBSD. I waited a couple of weeks or so to upgrade my servers, desktop, and laptop. Desktop and servers went fine. Desktop has GUI, KDE Plasma, on an nVidia RTX-3060 GPU. The servers do not run GUIs. The laptop, however, is an ancient Lenovo Thinkpad W520 (the last one with the good (non-chicklet) keyboard, as I have mentioned before), also KDE Plasma 6, but with a dodgy Optimus setup. Well, I had disabled the nVidia card in BIOS, since it seemed to have resolution problems. The Intel GPU gave me 1920x1080, but the nvidia gave me 1280x1024. (Note to future self: This is probably something else that can be fixed, maybe check it in your copious free time.)
I did the upgrade from 14.2 to 14.3 on everything, and everything came back up happily on 14.3...Except the laptop. It upgraded to 14.3, however, when the GUI came back up, it was at a resolution of 1280x1024. I troubleshot, but could not find the cause of it. In the short term, I booted back into 14.2, and continued searching for answers online, until other homelab projects overran the search for solutions. The laptop was running fine on 14.2.
So I forgot about it, until last week. I run my freebsd-updates and pkg upgrades via my ansible server, normally in that order. Well, I noticed last week, a few weeks after my endorphin rush, that my freebsd-update upgrade to 14.3p3 was skipped on the laptop. "Wait, what?" Oh yeah...Well the driver issue I had found earlier was probably the cause of the issue...
So I upgraded to 14.3 on the laptop, and again, it came up to the wrong resolution...So I posted to the FreeBSD forums, and quickly isolated the problem. They suggested that the DRM driver was for 14.2, drm-61-kmod-6.1.128.1402000_6. I tried to pkg install -r to reinstall, but that didn't do it, it only installed the same version and the same breakage.
I ended up doing pkg remove drm-61-kmod ; pkg install drm-61-kmod, which upgraded me from 1402000_6 to 1403000_6. At that point, rebooted and it came up at the correct screen resolution.
Another responder on the forum said you don't have to actually uninstall the package, you can do a pkg upgrade -r FreeBSD and
pkg upgrade -r FreeBSD-kmods...FreeBSD 14.3 and beyond adds the FreeBSD-kmods repository to /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf. However, this is, by default the quarterly repository. If you are using the latest, repo (which I do), then make sure you have the following in your /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf:
FreeBSD-kmods: {
url: "pkg+https://pkg.FreeBSD.org/${ABI}/kmods_latest_${VERSION_MINOR}"
}
So now I'm waiting for the release of 15.0...