After six months of development, FreeBSD 14.5 has been released. Installation images are available 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 FreeBSD 14.6 update is scheduled for March 2027. Support for the current FreeBSD 14.5 release will continue until June 30, 2027, and for the previous FreeBSD 14.4 release, it 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 ended on April 30, 2026. The FreeBSD 15 branch is being developed in parallel, with the latest release, 15.1, published three months ago.
Major changes in FreeBSD 14.5:
- Implemented in the kernel Linux-compatible inotify mechanism for monitoring filesystem changes. The libc functions inotify_init, inotify_init1, and inotify_add_watch have been added.
- Added sysctl setting security.bsd.unprivileged_kenv_read to disable unprivileged access to kernel environment variables (kenv).
- The msdosfs FS driver now supports using Unicode characters in file names (work with FAT32 partitions containing emoji in file names has been improved).
- The rc.firewall script now supports substitution of external files with lists into the firewall_allowservices and firewall_trusted variables. IP addresses and subnets.
- The mt tape drive program and the libmt library have been updated to support LTO-10 and LTO-10P cartridges, as well as new formats.
- The behavior of the pwd current path output utility has been changed, which, in accordance with the POSIX specifications, now defaults to displaying the names of symbolic links (-L) instead of displaying the path to which the symbolic links point (-P).
- A handler has been added to the ipfw utility to call the ipfw15 utility when running on a system with the new packet filter API introduced in the FreeBSD 15 kernel.
- The daemon utility now has a "-m" option to specify the access mode for the file being written to, to allow access for handlers running without root privileges.
- The local-unbound-setup script implements support for configuring DNS for IPv6-only systems.
- The C23 trigonometric functions sinpi, cospi, and tanpi, which multiply the passed argument by Pi, have been added to the math.h header file.
- The smartpqi driver has been updated to support new Microchip Smart Storage SCSI controllers and provide the ability to specify 32-bit values when determining the I/O buffer size.
- The acpi driver now supports additional Marvell 88SE9128 SATA controllers (which resolves issues with the Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD4 motherboard) and implements power management on Apple Mac systems with two GPUs (enabled via the hw.acpi.apple_darwin_osi sysctl parameter).
- The asmc driver has dropped support for 32-bit Apple Mac devices with Intel CPUs.
- The be-list and be-switch commands have been added to the lualoader for viewing and switching boot environments. Symbolic links are now handled when searching for bootable kernels. A callback handler has been added for filtering boot environments in Lua scripts launched by the lualoader.
- The bsdinstall installer ensures that the FreeBSD UEFI boot record is created correctly.
- The nvidia kernel modules, nvidia-modeset and nvidia-drm, have been added to the bootloader blacklist to prevent crashes if they are loaded early 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 used as the default linker, instead of an intermediate handler that determines the linker based on the PATH search order. The old approach resulted in the replacement of the ld.lld linker actually used in FreeBSD if GNU ld was additionally installed on the system.
- The lpr suite of programs has been deprecated and will be removed in FreeBSD 16.0. It is recommended to use the print/cups port or sysutils/LPRng instead of lpr. The lpd background process has been fixed, ignoring the port number from /etc/printcap when using IPv6.
Source: opennet.ru
