The FreeBSD project development report for July to September 2023 introduces a new driver implementing the SquashFS filesystem, which can enhance the efficiency of boot images, Live builds, and firmware based on FreeBSD. SquashFS operates in read-only mode and provides a very compact representation of metadata while storing data in a compressed format. The driver is implemented at the kernel level, supports FreeBSD 13.2, and among other things, allows booting FreeBSD with a SquashFS located in RAM.
Among other achievements highlighted in the report:
- Efforts have been made to address discomforts when using FreeBSD on the desktop. For example, the desktop-installer port, which allows for the quick installation and configuration of any user environment or window manager in FreeBSD, has added battery level notification output. The ports deskutils/qmediamanager, sysutils/devd-mount, and sysutils/npmount ensure the mounting of plugged-in media and provide notifications with information about the filesystem and possible actions (launching a file manager, formatting, copying an image, unmounting). A new port, deskutils/freebsd-update-notify, has been added to notify users of available updates and allow for quick automatic installation of updates for the base system, ports, and packages.
- The FreeBSD ports collection increased from 34,400 to 34,600 ports during the reporting period. The number of open PRs remains around 3,000 (730 PRs are still unaddressed). The HEAD branch saw 11,454 changes from 130 developers. Significant updates include: Mono 5.20, Perl 5.34, PostgreSQL 15, LibreOffice 7.6.2, KDE 5.27.8, KDE Gear 23.08, Rust 1.72.0, Wine 8.0.2, GCC 13.2.0, GitLab 16.3.
- In the Linux environment emulation infrastructure (Linuxulator), support for the xattr and ioprio system calls has been implemented, enabling the execution of rsync and debootstrap utilities compiled for Linux.
- The Pantheon desktop port, developed by the Elementary OS Linux distribution, has been updated.
- Support for creating snapshots of UFS and FFS file systems with logging (soft updates) has been enabled, and features for verifying snapshot integrity using the fsck utility have been added, as well as the ability to save snapshot dumps in the background without stopping the file system operation and without unmounting the partition (launching dump with the flag '-L').
- For amd64 systems, the use of SIMD instructions in system library functions has been expanded. For example, in libc, variants of functions that utilize the SSE, AVX, AVX2, and AVX-512F/BW/CD/DQ instruction sets have been added: bcmp(), index(), memchr(), memcmp(), stpcpy(), strchr(), strchrnul(), strcpy(), strcspn(), strlen(), strnlen(), and strspn(). Work is ongoing on the functions memcpy(), memmove(), strcmp(), timingsafe_bcmp(), and timingsafe_memcmp().
- Work is underway to transition 32-bit platforms to deprecated status in the release of FreeBSD 15.
- Improved CPU identification for riscv64.
- Work is being done on implementing support for the NXP DPAA2 (Data Path Acceleration Architecture Gen2) hardware acceleration architecture for network operations.
- Integration of OpenSSL 3 into the base system has been achieved.
- In /etc/login.conf, an 'inherit' parameter has been added for the properties priority and umask, which allows the properties' values to inherit from the login process. Additionally, it is now possible to lower the priority set in /etc/login.conf through the user file '~/login_conf'.
- Through the sysctl parameter security.bsd.see_jail_proc, unauthorized users in a separate jail environment can now be prohibited from forcefully terminating, altering the priority, and debugging hidden processes.
- MfsBSD utilities for building live images that load into memory have been integrated into the release build toolkit.
- Work is underway to create a ChatGPT-based plugin for developing an expert system that consults on issues related to FreeBSD.
- The Wifibox project has been updated, which develops the environment for using Linux WiFi drivers in FreeBSD.
- The BSD Cafe project has been introduced, supporting servers Mastodon and Matrix for communication and collaboration among FreeBSD users. The project has also launched a site with a wiki and the RSS reader Miniflux. Plans include the creation of a Git server and a virtualization platform.
Source: opennet.ru
