After 11 months of development, FreeBSD 13.3 has been released. Installation images are generated for amd64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpc64le, powerpcspe, armv6, armv7, aarch64 and riscv64 architectures. Additionally, assemblies have been prepared for virtualization systems (QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, raw) and cloud environments Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine and Vagrant. The FreeBSD 13.x branch is being developed in parallel with the FreeBSD 14 branch, for which release 14.0 was created in the fall, and will continue to be supported until the end of January 2026. FreeBSD 13.4 is expected to be released in about a year.
Key changes:
- The stability of drivers for wireless devices, as well as drivers launched using the linuxkpi layer, has been improved, allowing the use of Linux drivers in FreeBSD. Updated iwlwifi and rtw88 drivers for Intel and Realtek wireless cards.
- Implemented the ability to run an NFS server (nfsd, nfsuserd, mountd, gssd and rpc.tlsservd) in Jail with an isolated vnet network environment. Added new mount option "syskrb5" to mount Kerberized NFSv4.1/4.2 without specifying Kerberos credentials.
- The Clang compiler and LLVM toolkit have been updated to branch 17.
- The ZFS file system implementation has been updated to release OpenZFS 2.1.14. zfsd provides a way for disks to be designated as failed when they generate too many I/O latency events.
- On ARM64 systems, the background process powerd is enabled by default in /etc/rc.conf, allowing the system to run at maximum performance on Raspberry Pi boards.
- Added the ability to specify the umask value for individual services in rc.conf using the βservicename_umaskβ variables.
- Added the ability to specify in ~/.login_conf or login.conf the priorities of programs that use the setusercontext call, such as the login process.
- The ability to configure flags for the diff utility, launched when the periodic utility generates reports with changes, has been added to rc.conf.
- The head and tail utilities now support the -q (quiet) and -v (verbose) options, as well as the ability to use C units in numeric arguments.
- It includes the objdump utility, developed by the LLVM project.
- The β-Sβ option has been added to tftpd, which allows you to write to files in a chroot environment that are not publicly writable.
- The introductory guide to the kernel programming interfaces has been completely rewritten.
- Statistics related to filesystem and vnode debugging are grouped under the sysctl vfs.vnode series.
- By default, support for RFC 4620 (IPv6 nodeinfo, requesting host information) is disabled.
- The pf packet filter implements the ability (sysctl net.pf.filter_local=1) to apply packet redirection rules (rdr) sent by the current host and delivered locally.
- Added support for gve virtual network adapters (Google Virtual NIC).
- Support for BeagleBone Black (armv7) boards has been discontinued.
- Updated versions of OpenSSH 9.6p1, Sendmail 8.18.1, expat 2.6.0, libfido2 1.13.0, nvi 2.2.1, unbound 1.19.1, xz 5.4.5, zlib 1.3.1.
Additionally, you can note the publication of a report on the development of FreeBSD for the fourth quarter of 2023. Some of the most interesting projects include:
- The ability to automatically launch rc.d services in separate jail environments, in which the parent file system is inherited, but process visibility, network access, mount rights, etc. are limited.
- Work on optimizing libc string functions using SIMD instructions on AMD64 architecture systems. 17 functions optimized using SIMD were proposed, as well as 9 functions transferred to calling functions optimized using SIMD. The performance of the new functions when processing strings with an average size of 64 characters increased by 5.54 times during tests.
- Pot 0.16 toolkit for managing containers based on jail environments, ZFS, pf and rctl, supporting integration with the nomad container orchestration platform. The Potluck container image directory, which acts as an analogue of Dockerhub for FreeBSD.
Source: opennet.ru