The release of the desktop-oriented operating system MidnightBSD 4.0.4 has taken place, based on FreeBSD with elements ported from DragonFly BSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. The basic desktop environment is built on Xfce (optionally, a combination of GNUstep + Window Maker + GWorkspace can be installed). Unlike other desktop builds of FreeBSD, the MidnightBSD OS was originally developed as a fork of FreeBSD 6.1-beta, which was synchronized with the FreeBSD 7 codebase in 2011 and subsequently incorporated many features from FreeBSD versions 9-13. For package management in MidnightBSD, the mport system is used, which employs an SQLite database for storing indices and metadata, or the Ravenports toolkit. An installation image of 1 GB (i386, amd64) has been prepared for download.
In the new release:
- Verification capabilities for user age groups, required by the legislation of some countries, have been integrated. This includes the background process aged, which is configured through the 'aged_enable' parameter in /etc/rc.conf, and the utility agectl. The adduser utility has been modified to request age when creating a new user account. The agectl utility can be used to set the age or date of birth for existing accounts, such as 'doas agectl -a 15 myuser' or 'agectl -b 1966-02-28 myacct'. By default, the root user falls into the 18+ category.
Support for a flag that determines the acceptable age category has been added to packages. This flag is checked in the mport package manager during package installation and configures ACL to block access to the application for users younger than the specified age category.
In applications for determining age, the agectl utility may be called, the agev_get_age_bracket function from the libutil library may be used, or a request can be sent to the aged background process through a socket.
- A fix for the vulnerability CVE-2026-4747 has been ported from FreeBSD, allowing for code execution at the kernel level by sending network packets to the NFS server.
- The amd-cppc driver has been added, which manages energy consumption modes and frequency for AMD Zen 2+ CPUs that support the CPPC (Collaborative Processor Performance Control) mechanism.
Source: opennet.ru
