After six months of development, the release of FreeBSD 14.5 has been formed. Installation images have been prepared for the amd64, i386, aarch64, armv7, powerpc, powerpc64, and riscv64 architectures. Additionally, builds have been prepared for virtualization systems (QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, raw) and cloud environments such as Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, and Vagrant.
The next update, FreeBSD 14.6, is scheduled for March 2027. Support for the current release, FreeBSD 14.5, will be maintained until June 30, 2027, while support for the previous release, FreeBSD 14.4, will continue until December 31, 2026. Overall, the FreeBSD 14 branch will be supported until November 30, 2028. Support for the FreeBSD 13.x branch was discontinued on April 30, 2026. Concurrently, the FreeBSD 15 branch is being developed, with the current release 15.1 having been published three months ago.
Key changes in FreeBSD 14.5:
- A Linux-compatible inotify mechanism has been implemented in the kernel for tracking changes in file systems. Functions inotify_init, inotify_init1, and inotify_add_watch have been added to libc.
- A sysctl setting, security.bsd.unprivileged_kenv_read, has been added to prohibit unprivileged access to kernel environment variables (kenv).
- The msdosfs file system driver has been enhanced to allow the use of Unicode characters in file names (enabling compatibility with FAT32 partitions featuring emoji in file names).
- Support for variable substitution in the firewall_allowservices and firewall_trusted variables has been implemented in the rc.firewall script, allowing content from external files with lists (the key to connect to is specified, and iroh finds the associated host and establishes an encrypted connection using the QUIC protocol). Direct P2P connections are established whenever possible, but if not, it falls back to using relays, which are also employed for host discovery by keys. You can run your own relay or connect to public relays supported by the community. and subnets.
- Support for LTO-10 and LTO-10P cartridges as well as new formats has been added to the mt tape utility and the libmt library.
- The behavior of the pwd utility, which now by default uses the symbolic link display mode (-L) according to POSIX specifications instead of showing the path pointed to by symbolic links (-P), has been modified.
- An ipfw handler has been added to invoke the ipfw15 utility when launched in a system with the new packet filter interface introduced in the FreeBSD 15 kernel.
- The daemon utility has been enhanced with the option '-m' to specify the access mode for the output file to provide access to handlers running without root permissions.
- Support for DNS configuration in systems that use only IPv6 has been implemented in the local-unbound-setup script.
- The math.h header file has received additional trigonometric functions sinpi, cospi, and tanpi, which multiply the given argument by the number Pi as proposed in the C23 standard.
- The smartpqi driver has been updated to support new Microchip Smart Storage SCSI controllers and to allow specifying 32-bit values when defining I/O buffer size.
- The acpi driver has added support for additional models of Marvell 88SE9128 SATA controllers (resolving issues on the Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD4 motherboard) and has implemented power management functionality on Apple Mac systems with dual GPUs (enabled via the sysctl parameter hw.acpi.apple_darwin_osi).
- The asmc driver has discontinued support for 32-bit Apple Mac devices with Intel CPU.
- The lualoader bootloader has added the be-list and be-switch commands for viewing and switching boot environments. It ensures symbolic links are handled when searching for bootable kernels. A callback handler has been added for filtering boot environments in Lua scripts executed by the bootloader.
- The bsdinstall installer ensures the correct creation of a FreeBSD UEFI boot entry.
- The kernel modules nvidia, nvidia-modeset, and nvidia-drm have been blacklisted by the bootloader to prevent crashes due to their early loading via loader.conf.
- Updated versions of third-party components: LLVM/Clang 21.1.8, OpenSSL 3.0.21, unbound 1.26.0, Expat 2.8.1, file 5.47, ldns 1.9.2, less 704, libarchive 3.8.7, libpcap 1.10.6, ncurses 6.6, openresolv 3.17.4, NSS 3.123.1, tcpdump 4.99.6, xz 5.8.3.
- When using Clang, ld.lld (LLD) is now the default linker instead of an intermediate handler that selects the linker based on the discovery order in the PATH file paths. The old approach led to a replacement of the actual linker used in FreeBSD (ld.lld) if GNU ld was additionally installed on the system.
- The lpr set of programs has been marked as obsolete and will be removed in the FreeBSD 16.0 release. It is recommended to use the print/cups port or sysutils/LPRng instead. The lpd background process has resolved the issue of ignoring the port number from /etc/printcap when using IPv6.
Source: opennet.ru
