After six months of development, the FreeBSD 14.2 release has been finalized. Installation images are prepared for architectures amd64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpc64le, powerpcspe, armv7, aarch64, and riscv64. Additionally, builds have been prepared for virtualization systems (QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, raw) and cloud environments such as Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, and Vagrant.
As part of the updated development cycle, the next release, FreeBSD 14.3, will be finalized in June 2025. Support for the current release, FreeBSD 14.2, will continue until September 30, 2025, while support for the previous release, FreeBSD 14.1, will last until March 31, 2025. Overall, the FreeBSD 14 branch will be maintained until November 30, 2028. Meanwhile, the FreeBSD 13.x branch continues to evolve, with the next release (13.5) scheduled for March 2025. The first release of the next major branch, FreeBSD 15, which will discontinue support for 32-bit architectures (except for armv7 and COMPAT_FREEBSD32 mode), is planned for December 2025.
Key changes in FreeBSD 14.2:
- The bsdinstall installer has been enhanced to support downloading and installing packages with firmware for the hardware used.
- The formation of container images in OCI (Open Container Initiative) format has begun.
- A compact variant of system images for Amazon EC2 has been created, excluding debug symbols, tests, 32-bit libraries, the LLDB debugger, Amazon SSM Agent, and AWS CLI. ARM64 builds for Amazon EC2 now support the shutdown and reboot APIs.
- Official support for POWER10 and POWER11 processors has been added.
- The fdisk utility has been deprecated, and it is recommended to use gpart instead. Fdisk is planned to be removed from FreeBSD 15 distribution. In the FreeBSD 14 branch, a warning about the need to migrate to gpart will now be issued when fdisk is run.
- To reduce size, graphical mode support has been removed from the bootloader for BIOS systems, but support for gzip and bzip2 compression algorithms has been restored. The bootloader for EFI remains unchanged.
- A number of improvements have been made to the sound stack. For example, a new utility, mididump (for tracking MIDI events), has been introduced, and support for hot-swapping between sound devices in mixer has been added.
- The Linux environment emulation infrastructure (Linuxulator) has improved compatibility with applications built for the Linux platform (including ignoring the AT_NO_AUTOMOUNT flag for all variants of the stat() function call in Linux applications).
- The nvme (NVM Express) driver and the nvmecontrol utility are included for all architectures.
- Third-party component versions have been updated: Clang/LLVM 18.1.6 (was 18.1.5), OpenZFS 2.2.6 (was 2.2.4), OpenSSL 3.0.15 (was 3.0.12), bc 7.0.2, libarchive 3.7.7, libcbor 0.11.0, libfido2 1.14.0, libpcap 1.10.5, tcpdump 4.99.5, unbound 1.22.0.
- The env utility has been updated with the '-C' option for changing the working directory, implemented similarly to the env utility from the GNU coreutils set.
- The nuageinit startup script now includes support for configuring network settings at startup in virtual machine an OpenStack environment.
- Support for detecting startup in a guest system managed by the NVMM hypervisor, developed by the NetBSD project, has been provided.
- The used hypervisor Bhyve server VNC has implemented correct color support when connecting through the novnc client.
- Under the Hyper-V hypervisor, the performance of the TLB (Translation Lookaside Buffer) has significantly increased (up to 40%) due to the use of hypercalls for TLB flushing.
- Performance optimization has been conducted in the network stack, and issues in the SCTP stack have been resolved.
- The stability of drivers for wireless devices has improved, as well as drivers (such as iwlwifi) launched via the linuxkpi layer, allowing the use of Linux drivers in FreeBSD.
- The issue with the error ‘madt_parse_apics: I/O APIC ID 255 too high’ during boot on systems with AMD processors has been resolved (the maximum IOAPIC ID value has been increased from 254 to 255).
- Support for the AIM (Adaptive Interrupt Moderation) algorithm has been added to the igc (Intel Ethernet Controller I225) and lem/em/igb (Intel PRO/1000 Gigabit Ethernet) drivers, allowing reduction of latency on low packet-rate channels and decreasing CPU load and interrupt frequency under high packet rates. This change also resolved the performance regression in UDP that started appearing with FreeBSD 12.0, particularly noticeable when using NFS over UDP.
- Device drivers have been updated: ena 2.8.0 (Amazon Elastic Network Adapter), ice_ddp 1.3.41.0, and ice 1.43.2-k (Intel Ethernet 800). The hda driver has added support for processors based on the Intel Tiger Lake-H microarchitecture, while the ig4 and ichsmb drivers have been updated for Intel Meteor Lake.
- A new rtw89 driver has been added for IEEE 802.11ax wireless adapters based on Realtek RTL8851BE, RTL8852AE, RTL8852BE, and RTL8852CE chips. Support for Realtek 8156/8156B chips has been transitioned from the cdce driver to the ure driver, resulting in improved performance and reliability.
- The wifi-firmware-kmod package with firmware for wireless cards has been added to the packages supplied on the installation medium (dvd1).
- The syscons and agp drivers are planned for removal in future releases.
Source: opennet.ru
