After 11 months of development, the release of FreeBSD 13.3 has been published. Installation images have been created for the amd64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpc64le, powerpcspe, armv6, armv7, aarch64, and riscv64 architectures. Additional builds for virtualization systems (QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, raw) and cloud environments such as Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, and Vagrant have been prepared. The FreeBSD 13.x branch is being developed in parallel with the FreeBSD 14 branch, which had the 14.0 release formed in the fall, and will continue to be supported until the end of January 2026. The release of FreeBSD 13.4 is expected to be formed in about a year. <\/p>\n
Key changes: <\/p>\n
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The stability of drivers for wireless devices has been improved, as well as drivers launched through the linuxkpi layer, which allows the use of Linux drivers in FreeBSD. The iwlwifi and rtw88 drivers for Intel and Realtek wireless cards have been updated.\n
The ability to run an NFS server (nfsd, nfsuserd, mountd, gssd, and rpc.tlsservd) in a Jail with an isolated network environment (vnet) has been implemented. A new mounting option 'syskrb5' has been added for mounting Kerberized NFSv4.1\/4.2 without specifying Kerberos credentials.\n
The Clang compiler and LLVM toolchain have been updated to branch 17.\n
The implementation of the ZFS file system has been updated to release OpenZFS 2.1.14. In zfsd, it is now ensured that disks are given a failed status when generating too many input\/output delay events.\n
On ARM64 architecture systems, the powerd background process has been enabled by default in \/etc\/rc.conf, allowing the system to operate in maximum performance mode on Raspberry Pi boards.\n
In rc.conf, the ability to specify umask values for individual services using the 'service_name_umask' variables has been added.\n
The ability to specify priorities for programs using the setusercontext call, such as the login process, has been added in ~\/.login_conf or login.conf.\n
The ability to configure flags for the diff utility, which is invoked during the generation of periodic change reports, has been added to rc.conf.\n
The head and tail utilities have been enhanced to support the -q (quiet) and -v (verbose) options, as well as the ability to use SI units in numeric arguments.\n
The objdump utility, developed by the LLVM project, has been included.\n
In tftpd, the '-S' option has been added, allowing the organization of file writes in a chroot environment that are not available for shared writing.\n
The introductory guide to the kernel interfaces has been completely rewritten.\n
Statistics related to debugging file systems and vnodes are grouped within the sysctl vfs.vnode series.\n
Support for RFC 4620 (IPv6 nodeinfo, host information request) is disabled by default.\n
The pf packet filter now has the ability (sysctl net.pf.filter_local=1) to apply redirection rules (rdr) for packets sent by the current host and delivered locally.\n
Support for virtual network adapters gve (Google Virtual NIC) has been added.\n
Support for BeagleBone Black boards (armv7) has been discontinued.\n
Additionally, a report on the development of FreeBSD for the fourth quarter of 2023 has been published. The most interesting projects include: <\/p>\n
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The ability for rc.d services to automatically start in separate jail environments, inheriting the parent filesystem, but limiting process visibility, network access, mounting rights, etc.\n
Work on optimizing libc string functions using SIMD instructions on AMD64 architecture systems. A total of 17 functions have been optimized with SIMD, along with 9 functions that have been transitioned to call optimized SIMD functions. The performance of the new functions for processing strings with an average length of 64 characters increased by 5.54 times in tests.\n
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 catalog acts as an alternative to Dockerhub for FreeBSD. <\/ul>\n