{"id":142582,"date":"2025-09-08T17:11:54","date_gmt":"2025-09-08T15:11:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/prohoster.info\/blog\/novosti-interneta\/nachalos-alfa-testirovanie-freebsd-15"},"modified":"2025-09-08T17:11:54","modified_gmt":"2025-09-08T15:11:54","slug":"nachalos-alfa-testirovanie-freebsd-15","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prohoster.info\/en\/blog\/news\/nachalos-alfa-testirovanie-freebsd-15","title":{"rendered":"Alpha Testing of FreeBSD 15 Has Started","gt_translate_keys":[{"key":"rendered","format":"text"}]},"content":{"rendered":"
The first alpha release of FreeBSD 15.0 has been prepared. Installation builds have been created for the amd64, powerpc64le, aarch64, and riscv64 architectures. The release is scheduled for December 2. Updating to the 15.0-ALPHA1 branch from previous releases using the freebsd-update utility is not yet implemented. <\/p>\n
Starting with the FreeBSD 15 branch, the support time for significant branches after the first release (15.0) has been reduced from 5 to 4 years, and new significant branches will be formed every two years. Intermediate releases (15.1, 15.2, 15.3) will be developed within a fixed development cycle, implying the publication of new versions in one branch approximately every 6 months, rather than once a year as it has been until now. Considering the simultaneous support of two different significant branches, a new intermediate release will be published every 3 months (15.4, 16.1, 15.5, 16.2, etc.), except for the preparation of the first releases of new significant branches, before which there will be a 6-month release hiatus (for example, release 15.3 will be formed in June 2027, 16.0 in December 2027, 15.4 \u2014 in March 2028, 16.1 \u2014 in June 2028). <\/p>\n
The official announcement of the FreeBSD 15 alpha version contains a link to the release notes (copy) with an incorrect list of changes. The mentioned list is meaningless, as it contains changes that are not specific to the FreeBSD 15 branch, but rather changes in the 14.x branch regarding the 14.0 release, i.e., it includes old data transferred from previously published release notes for 14.1, 14.2, and 14.3. <\/p>\n
Some changes in the FreeBSD 15 branch noted in Git: <\/p>\n
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The creation of installation images and builds of binary packages for 32-bit architectures has been discontinued. The ability to build 32-bit programs and use the COMPAT_FREEBSD32 mode to run 32-bit executables in a 64-bit kernel environment will remain at least until the end of the lifecycle of the FreeBSD 16 branch.\n
The gvinum logical volume manager, which was used for software RAID, has been removed. Gvinum development stopped about 15 years ago, despite known issues in the code that have not been addressed. It is recommended to use gconcat, gmirror, gstripe, graid, or zfs instead of gvinum.\n
The agp driver (Accelerated Graphics Port), necessary for the operation of many drivers for older graphics cards, is planned for removal.\n
The status of the i915 and amdgpu DRM drivers is synchronized with the Linux kernel 6.9.\n
Support for named file attributes (Solaris-style extended attributes) has been added, which are planned to be supported as an alternative mechanism for managing extended attributes available for ZFS and NFSv4. The differences from traditional methods of working with extended attributes in FreeBSD and Linux come down to the representation of attributes in a service directory, which is not visible in the main namespace of the FS and is associated with the file. Attributes are handled like normal files; for example, to determine the list of attributes, the readdir() function can be used.\n
System calls have been implemented with the inotify mechanism to track changes in file systems.\n
A utility called sndctl has been added for managing sound card settings.\n
A utility called mididump has been added for dumping MIDI 1.0 events in real time.\n
The mac_do module has been declared ready for use, allowing the specification of policies that permit unprivileged users to change process credentials. A utility called mdo, similar to the su utility but not requiring suid root, has been prepared to run commands as another user.\n
The TLS protocol implementation on the kernel side (KTLS) is enabled by default.\n
A new network backend \"slirp\" has been added to the bhyve hypervisor, utilizing the libslirp library with a user-space network stack implementation. The \"slirp\" backend allows access to the network of the guest system from the host environment without separate network configuration on the host side.\n
The behavior of the system calls setgroups, getgroups, and initgroups when handling user groups has been aligned closer to other platforms (the difference in FreeBSD's implementation was that it stored the effective group identifier in the zero element of the group list array).\n
The Kerberos implementation in the main FreeBSD repository has been replaced from Heimdal Kerberos to MIT Kerberos. To revert back to Heimdal Kerberos during the build, the WITHOUT_MITKRB5 flag can be used. Support for building Heimdal Kerberos will be removed in FreeBSD 16.\n