The release of the desktop-oriented operating system MidnightBSD 4.0 has taken place, based on FreeBSD with elements ported from DragonFly BSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. The basic desktop environment is built on Xfce (optionally, the GNUstep + Window Maker + GWorkspace combination can be installed). Unlike other desktop builds of FreeBSD, MidnightBSD was originally developed as a fork of FreeBSD 6.1-beta, which was synchronized with the FreeBSD 7 code base in 2011 and later incorporated many features from FreeBSD branches 9-13. The package management in MidnightBSD is handled by the mport system, which uses an SQLite database to store indexes and metadata, or the Ravenports toolkit. An installation image of size 1 GB (i386, amd64) is prepared for download.
This release is notable for updating third-party library versions and carrying over fixes and new features from the FreeBSD 13 branch. Key innovations include:
- The package manager mport has been updated to version 2.7.3, which introduces the ability to verify individual ports with the command 'mport verify' and restore checksums with the command 'mport verify -r'. Dependency management has been enhanced in the mport_install command.
- The init, service, and cron programs now utilize environment variables specified for users or user classes via login.conf.
- The kernel has added support for memory mapping in W^X mode, which prevents simultaneous write and execute access.
- A BSD-licensed version of the grep utility has replaced GNU grep.
- A system call compatible with Linux, copy_file_range, has been added, along with the system calls aio_readv and aio_writev.
- Support for process debugging via procfs has been added.
- A backlight driver for managing display backlighting has been added.
- The cpufreq driver has implemented support for Intel Speed Shift technology.
- In the client and server NFS, support for NFSv4.2, NFS over TLS, and extended attributes has been added.
- The transition to the ZFS file system implementation from the OpenZFS project (2.1.15) has been carried out.
- The FUSE subsystem implementation has been updated to version 7.28 with support for FUSE_COPY_FILE_RANGE and FUSE_LSEEK.
- TCP stack integration now includes support for the Proportional Rate Reduction algorithm (RFC 6937), allowing for quicker recovery of optimal flow parameters after temporary data transmission issues.
- Support for nested VLANs (802.1ad) has been added.
- SCTP protocol support has been moved to a separate sctp.ko module, which is disabled by default in the GENERIC kernel.
- Routing algorithms from DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) librte have been added to optimize work with very large routing tables.
- On 64-bit architectures, the base system is compiled by default with PAE (Position Independent Executable) support.
- The iwlwifi driver has been added for Intel wireless cards, supporting new chips and the 802.11ac standard. The driver is based on the Linux driver and code from the Linux net80211 subsystem, which is facilitated in FreeBSD using the linuxkpi layer.
- Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) is enabled by default for all executable files in the base system on 64-bit platforms.
- Support for the Netlink communication protocol (RFC 3549), used in Linux to facilitate interaction between the kernel and user space processes, has been implemented.
- Support for file sharing via VirtIO-9p (VirtFS), support for PCI HDAudio devices, and the ability to work with snapshots have been added to the Bhyve hypervisor. of virtual machines.
- A set of VirtIO drivers supporting the VirtIO V1 specification has been added. The pvscsi driver for paravirtualized SCSI controllers has been introduced.
- An implementation of TLS (kTLS) operating at the kernel level has been added.
- Versions LLVM 19.1.7, unbound 1.23.0, OpenSSH 9.9p2, lua 5.4.2, and wpa+hostapd 2.11 have been updated.
- gcc, libdispatch, and binutils have been removed.
Source: opennet.ru
