BSD News Archives

The FreeBSD project has issued their quarterly status report for Q4'2015 to highlight all the progress they made in ending out 2015.

François Revol presented at FOSDEM this weekend about the prospects of Haiku OS ever becoming a BSD distribution. Haiku OS, the well known BeOS re-implementation, does currently rely upon some BSD components but more integration is possible.

With ZFS file-system support continuing to spread via OpenZFS, you may be one of the many out there still wondering about the benefits of ZFS.

OPNsense, the open-source firewall project powered by FreeBSD that began as a fork of pfSense, is out with a new release.

Last week I had plans to run some fresh FreeBSD vs. Linux gaming benchmarks using the FreeBSD's Linux software binary compatibility layer.

The DragonFlyBSD Intel DRM graphics driver sure is getting close to catching up against the upstream Intel Linux graphics driver with the mainline kernel.

Thanks to work done by Netflix and NGINX, a new, drop-in-replacement sendfile syscall has been written for FreeBSD that is much faster.

DragonFlyBSD's Francois Tigeot has done some more great work in allowing their open-source Intel graphics driver to be more featureful and comparable to the Linux i915 kernel DRM driver for which it is based.

While we primarily focus on Linux operating system news and releases, I do enjoy watching the *BSD space and covering their major events. This year has saw some great updates for DragonFlyBSD, FreeBSD, and friends. Here's a look at the most popular BSD news on Phoronix for 2015.

DragonFlyBSD 4.4 is ready for release with a number of exciting improvements and new features.

DragonFlyBSD has switched to using the Gold Linker by default rather than GNU ld.

The DragonFlyBSD operating system continues to move along.

The PC-BSD developers working on their Lumina Desktop Environment have released Lumina 0.8.7 on Monday.

The FreeBSD 2015'Q3 quarterly report has been issued to recap the latest activity happening for this popular BSD project.

OpenBSD 5.8 was released today and its release happens to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the OpenBSD project.

While open-source AMD Linux users have largely been able to take it for granted for years that the Radeon DRM/KMS driver will at least light up their display when using an older GPU, after the Radeon KMS problems I ran into on DragonFlyBSD, I didn't expect this hardware to play nicely on FreeBSD/PC-BSD 10.2. Fortunately, I was proven wrong and this AMD FirePro graphics card driving a DisplayPort monitor managed to run nicely out-of-the-box.

Given the recent releases of FreeBSD 10.2 and NetBSD 7.0, plus the H2'2015 Linux distribution updates rolling around, I've just started work on a new BSD vs. Linux operating system performance comparison.

NetBSD 7.0 was quietly released at the end of September.

The latest OpenBSD kernel finally adds support for Broadwell graphics while Skylake support is still a ways out for this BSD operating system.

The OpenBSD crew has released version 2.3.0 of their forked OpenSSL project, the widely-known LibreSSL.

Pkg 1.6.0 is coming in the days ahead to FreeBSD as the latest updates to their package manager for this BSD distribution and other platforms.

The OpenBSD Foundation has been funding work on a project to provide OpenBSD with its own, native hypervisor.

Just a few days ago I was writing about DragonFlyBSD's HAMMER2 file-system maturing and now this weekend it's picked up another high profile feature: live deduplication.

NeXTBSD was announced last weekend and it's easily been the most emailed in tip all week. Lots of Phoronix readers are curious about this new operating system derived from FreeBSD 10.1 that adds in various Mac OS X components. NeXTBSD seems like a very interesting open-source project while this morning I finally found the time to explore more about it and write-up a post.

François Tigeot has landed his i915 Intel DRM driver update that brings the DragonFlyBSD's Intel graphics driver up to parity with the Linux 3.17 kernel.

Back in 2012 the HAMMER2 file-system was announced and lead DragonflyBSD developer Matthew Dillon didn't believe it would be until some time a year later (2013) that this HAMMER successor would all pan out. After more than three years of development, HAMMER2 seems like it's getting into shape.

François Tigeot, the developer that's been prolific in porting the DRM/KMS code from Linux to DragonFlyBSD, now has the Radeon DRM code matching that of the Linux 3.17 kernel.

The latest version of the desktop-focused PC-BSD operating system is now available.

The third -- and hopefully final -- release candidate for NetBSD 7.0 is now available.

As anticipated, FreeBSD 10.2 is now officially available.

FreeBSD 10.2 is going to be released on time. The -RELEASE process has begun.

OpenSSH 7.0 has been released, the latest major update to the OpenBSD-led project that provides a widely-used SSH 2.0 implementation.

Building off the recent FreeBSD 10.2 release candidates is the first RC of the upcoming PC-BSD 10.2 desktop.

The Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) has made a donation in the range of $50~100k USD to the OpenBSD project.

Glen Barber announced the release of FreeBSD 10.2-RC2 today for those wanting to do some weekend BSD testing.

Francois Tigeot's latest effort on porting the Intel i915 DRM code from the Linux kernel to DragonFlyBSD has paid off in the form of full acceleration for Broadwell "Gen8" HD/Iris Graphics.

For users of NetBSD, the second release candidate for its upcoming 7.0 release is now available.

The FreeBSD project made much progress during this past quarter (Q2'2015) on many fronts from working on FreeBSD 10.2 to landing new work in FreeBSD 11.0-CURRENT for improving their Linux binary emulation layer.

The latest ARM platform that NetBSD has been ported to is the NVIDIA Jetson TK1.

The release candidate for FreeBSD 10.2 is now available.

The upstream Linux kernel has had its upstream Valley View DRM graphics support for a few years now for the HD Graphics found within Intel's Atom/Celeron "Bay Trail" SoCs. The DragonFlyBSD kernel as of today has finally managed to put its Linux-ported Intel DRM driver into a state that it too can support Valley View.

The latest drama in the FreeBSD world are over differing views with the project's new code of conduct.

The PC-BSD crew has released version 0.8.5 of their Lumina desktop.

GhostBSD 10.1 Beta 2 was released today as the newest release of this desktop-focused BSD operating system derived currently from FreeBSD 10.1.

The first beta of the upcoming FreeBSD 10.2 release is now available. Besides the generic FreeBSD 10.2-BETA1 spins for x86, x86_64, IA64, PowerPC, PowerPC 64-bit, and SPARC 64-bit, there are also ARMv6 spins for the Beaglebone, CuBox-Hummingboard, RaspberryPi B, and Wandboard.

As a fork of pfSense, the OPNsense project that's a FreeBSD-based open-source firewall distribution did its first production-ready release this week.

The PC-BSD development team today announced their 10.2 pre-release, which continues to be derived from FreeBSD. Additionally they've also announced new 11.0-CURRENT images for those wishing to get a look ahead at FreeBSD/PC-BSD 11.0.

DragonFlyBSD 4.2 was released this morning as the next major release to this popular BSD operating system. For end-users there are a lot of notable changes with this update.

NetBSD 7.0 Release Candidate 1 was made available today with some mighty big improvements.

This past February, Monowall announced the end of development as one of the most popular FreeBSD-based network/firewall focused distributions. For those still searching for a new replacement, Smallwall 1.8.2 has been released as the successor to Monowall 1.8.1.