FreeBSD 12.4 released. Install images are available for amd64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpcspe, sparc64 and armv6, armv7 and aarch64 architectures. Additionally prepared images for virtualization systems (QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, raw) and Amazon EC2 cloud environments. FreeBSD 12.4 will be the last update of the 12.x branch, which will continue to be maintained until December 31, 2023. The FreeBSD 13.2 update will be prepared in the spring, and FreeBSD 2023 is scheduled for release in July 14.0.
Key innovations:
- Deprecated the telnetd server process, whose codebase is unmaintained and has quality issues. In the FreeBSD 14 branch, the telnetd code will be removed from the system. Telnet client support remains unchanged.
- The if_epair driver, which is used to create virtual Ethernet interfaces, provides the ability to parallelize traffic processing using several CPU cores.
- The cp utility implements protection against the occurrence of infinite recursion when using the "-R" flag, ensures correct processing of the "-H", "-L" and "-P" flags (for example, when specifying "-H" or "-P", the expanding symlinks), the "-P" flag is allowed without the "-R" flag.
- Improved performance of nfsd, elfctl, usbconfig, fsck_ufs and growfs utilities.
- In the sh command interpreter, the profile loading logic has been changed: first, all files with the β.shβ extension are loaded from the /etc/profile.d directory, then the /usr/local/etc/profile file is loaded, after which the files with the β.shβ extension are loaded from the /usr/local/etc/profile.d/ directory.
- The tcpdump utility provides the ability to set the number of rules displayed in the pflog header.
- With DragonFly BSD, the dma (DragonFly Mail Agent) message delivery agent code is synchronized, which ensures the receipt and delivery of messages from local mail clients (processing network SMTP requests through port 25 is not supported).
- The pf packet filter fixed memory leaks and improved state synchronization when redirecting traffic when using pfsync.
- Added DT5 and SDT test calls to the ipfilter packet filter for the dtrace tracing mechanism. Implemented the ability to dump a dump with a copy of ippool in the ippool.conf format. It is forbidden to change ipfilter rules, address translation tables and ip pools (ippool) from jail environments that do not use the VNET virtual network stack.
- Support for Intel CPUs based on Comet Lake, Ice Lake, Tiger Lake and Rocket Lake microarchitectures has been added to the hwpmc (Hardware Performance Monitoring Counter) framework.
- Improved hardware support. Fixed bugs in aesni, aw_spi, igc, ixl, mpr, ocs_fc, snd_uaudio, usb drivers. The ena driver has been updated to version 2.6.1 to support the second generation of ENAv2 (Elastic Network Adapter) network adapters used in the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure to organize communication between EC2 nodes.
- Updated versions of third-party applications included in the base system: LLVM 13, unbound 1.16.3, OpenSSL 1.1.1q, OpenSSH 9.1p1, file 5.43, libarchive 3.6.0, sqlite 3.39.3, expat 2.4.9, hostapd/wpa_supplicant 2.10.
Source: opennet.ru