The FreeBSD 12.4 release has been presented. Installation images are available for the amd64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpcspe, sparc64, armv6, armv7, and aarch64 architectures. Additionally, images have been prepared for virtualization systems (QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, raw) and Amazon EC2 cloud environments. FreeBSD 12.4 will be the last update for the 12.x branch, which will be supported until December 31, 2023. An update for FreeBSD 13.2 will be prepared in the spring, and the release of FreeBSD 14.0 is scheduled for July 2023.
Key innovations:
- The server process telnetd has been deprecated; its code base is unmaintained and has quality issues. In FreeBSD 14, the telnetd code will be removed from the system. The telnet client support remains unchanged.
- The if_epair driver, used for creating virtual Ethernet interfaces, has been enhanced to allow parallel processing of traffic using multiple CPU cores.
- The cp utility has implemented protection against infinite recursion when using the '-R' flag, ensured correct processing of the '-H', '-L', and '-P' flags (for instance, specifying '-H' or '-P' stops the expansion of symbolic links), and allows the usage of the '-P' flag without the '-R' flag.
- Improvements have been made to the utilities nfsd, elfctl, usbconfig, fsck_ufs, and growfs.
- In the sh shell, the logic for loading profiles has been changed: first, all files with the '.sh' extension are loaded from the /etc/profile.d directory, then the /usr/local/etc/profile file is loaded, followed by the loading of '.sh' files from the /usr/local/etc/profile.d/ directory.
- In the tcpdump utility, the ability to set the number of rules displayed in the pflog header has been introduced.
- The message delivery agent dma (DragonFly Mail Agent) code has been synchronized with DragonFly BSD, which handles the reception and delivery of messages from local mail clients (network SMTP requests over port 25 are not supported).
- Memory leaks have been fixed in the pf packet filter, and state synchronization has been improved when redirecting traffic using pfsync.
- The ipfilter packet filter has added validation calls DT5 and SDT for the dtrace tracing mechanism. It has implemented the ability to reset a dump with a copy of the ippool in the ippool.conf format. Changes to ipfilter rules, address translation tables, and ip-pools (ippool) from jail environments that do not use the virtual network stack VNET are prohibited.
- Support for Intel CPUs based on the Comet Lake, Ice Lake, Tiger Lake, and Rocket Lake microarchitectures has been added to the hwpmc (Hardware Performance Monitoring Counter) framework.
- Hardware support has been improved. Bugs in the aesni, aw_spi, igc, ixl, mpr, ocs_fc, snd_uaudio, and usb drivers have been fixed. The ena driver has been updated to version 2.6.1, supporting the second generation of ENAv2 (Elastic Network Adapter) network adapters used in the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure for node communication.
- The versions of third-party applications included in the base system have been updated: LLVM 13, unbound 1.16.3, OpenSSL 1.1.1q, OpenSSH 9.1p1, file 5.43, libarchive 3.6.0, sqlite 3.39.3, expat 2.4.9, hostapd/wpa_supplicant 2.10.
Source: opennet.ru
