The MidnightBSD 2.2 desktop operating system, based on FreeBSD with elements ported from DragonFly BSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD, has been released. The base desktop environment is based on GNUstep, but users have the option to install WindowMaker, GNOME, Xfce, or Lumina. A 774 MB installation image (x86, amd64) has been prepared for download.
Unlike other desktop builds of FreeBSD, MidnightBSD was originally developed as a fork of FreeBSD 6.1-beta, which was synchronized with the FreeBSD 2011 codebase in 7 and subsequently incorporated many features from the FreeBSD 9-12 branches. MidnightBSD's package management uses the mport system, which uses a SQLite database to store indexes and metadata. Installing, removing and searching for packages is done using a single mport command.
Major changes:
- Updated software versions, including Perl 5.36.0, OpenSSH 8.8p1, lua 5.3.6, subversion 1.14.1, sqlite 3.38.2.
- The /bin/sh shell code is in sync with the FreeBSD 12-STABLE branch.
- The default shell for the root user is tcsh instead of csh, and the less utility is used for paging.
- Added patches from the pfsense project that increase the performance of the dummynet traffic cut system from 2Gb/s to 4Gb/s.
- The mport package manager has been updated to version 2.2.0. libdispatch and gcd are excluded from dependencies, which allows you to generate static mport assemblies. Added "desktop-file-utils" option to plist and implemented the ability to create packages with kernel modules. Added support for using chroot to update individual jail environments.
- Ported support for sctp from FreeBSD to Netcat.
- Added ptsname_r function to libc.
- Ported bug fixes for Ipfilter from FreeBSD.
- The bootstrap script ensures that dbus and hald are enabled.
Additionally, we can note the release of the DragonFly BSD 6.2.2 project, which develops an operating system with a hybrid kernel, created in 2003 with the aim of alternative development of the FreeBSD 4.x branch. Among the features of DragonFly BSD, one can note the HAMMER distributed versioned file system, the ability to boot "virtual" system cores as user processes, the means of caching data and FS metadata on SSD drives, context-sensitive symbolic links, the ability to freeze processes while saving their state on disk and a hybrid kernel using lightweight threads (LWKT). The new release only offers bug fixes.
Source: opennet.ru