After 6 months of development, the release of the FreeBSD 13.4 operating system has been published. This marks the first release formed under the updated development cycle, which aims to create intermediate releases every six months. Installation images of FreeBSD 13.4 are available for amd64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpc64le, powerpcspe, armv6, armv7, aarch64, and riscv64 architectures. Additionally, builds for virtualization systems (QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, raw) and cloud environments such as Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, and Vagrant have been prepared. The next release, 13.5, is scheduled for March and will be supported until April 2026. Concurrently, the FreeBSD 14 branch is under development, with the next release (14.2) planned for December 2024. The first release of the FreeBSD 15 branch will be formed in December 2025.
Key changes:
- The libcapsicum library has implemented caching of additional information about time zones, which has reduced the number of calls to the tzset function and improved performance.
- Updated versions of LLVM 18.1.5, SQLite 3.46.0, OpenSSH 9.7p1, libarchive 3.7.4.
- Performance optimizations and fixes have been made to the network stack. Support for the SCTP protocol has been improved, and the loopback interface has gained the ability to offload checksum calculation operations for SCTP packets to the network card.
- Support for AMD Ryzen 7 'Phoenix' processors has been added to the amdsmn (System Management Network) and amdtemp drivers, enabling temperature reading from sensors on the CPU via sysctl.
- Device drivers for Intel Ethernet 8xx network adapters, irdma and ice, have been updated. The u3g driver has added support for the LTE modem SIM7600G. Fixes have been made to drivers for wireless devices.
- Changes have been made to the packages included on the installation medium (dvd1):
- The port devel/git has been replaced with the shortened variant devel/git@lite.
- The ports sysutils/seatd and x11-wm/sway have been added to create environments based on Wayland.
- The port archivers/unzip has been removed as the unzip utility has been moved to the base system.
- The port emulators/linux_base-c7 has been removed, as it serves no purpose without installing Linux packages.
- The port ports-mgmt/portmaster has been removed, and users are advised to use the pkg package manager and binary packages instead.
- The drivers x11-drivers/xf86-video-vmware have been removed from the ports, as they are problematic to use with the current version of the X server.
Source: opennet.ru
