BSD News Archives

Matthew Dillon's latest addition to DragonFlyBSD will help those that build out the full kernel themselves: parallelized kernel module builds. This change for developers allows the the kernel build process to be multiple times faster when doing a full kernel build.

With work on porting the Linux Intel and Radeon DRM/KMS drivers progressing, within DragonFlyBSD Git they've made the first "hacky steps" for making their system console work with the KMS drivers.

The FreeBSD release engineering team has laid out plans for the next FreeBSD 10 release.

Besides DragonFlyBSD's Intel graphics support moving forward with porting of i915 DRM code from newer versions of the Linux kernel over to the DragonFlyBSD kernel, there's also been new activity on the Radeon front.

DragonFlyBSD's HAMMER2 file-system has seen a lot of progress made recently. One of the latest additions to this HAMMER successor is enabling LZ4 compression by default.

PC-BSD 10.1.2 was released today as the latest quarterly update to the FreeBSD-derived operating system.

For DragonFlyBSD users out there, the swap device with the latest Git kernel can now be encrypted.

Earlier this month we wrote about DragonFlyBSD having experimental Broadwell graphics support and now this updated DRM driver code has landed in the BSD distribution. Besides supporting the new Intel Broadwell HD/Iris Graphics, there's also a number of other new features.

The first beta of GhostBSD 10.1, the desktop-focused distribution using the FreeBSD kernel with MATE Desktop Environment, is now available.

DragonFlyBSD developers continue porting over code from the Linux kernel's i915 DRM driver for supporting newer Intel graphics features on BSD. The latest work is for matching the DragonFlyBSD's ported Intel driver up through the code found in the Linux 3.14 kernel.

PC-BSD developers have worked out some May Day releases of the first release candidate to PC-BSD 10.1.2 and they've also released a new version of their custom Lumina Desktop.

OpenBSD developers are celebrating May Day by releasing OpenBSD 5.7, as previously planned.

The FreeBSD pkg tool for binary package management has been upgraded to pkg v1.5.0. The pkg 1.5 release brings with it a number of exciting imporvements.

DragonFlyBSD developers have updated their ACPI power management implementation against Intel's ACPICA code as of yesterday.

OpenBSD 5.7 is planned for release in less than one month and it will be presenting a number of new features for this security-minded BSD operating system.

AMD tech support has allegedly confirmed that Catalyst is being ported to FreeBSD.

The PC-BSD developers responsible for their new Lumina desktop environment have released a new version of their custom interface.

The HAMMER2 file-system has been slow to mature since being announced three years ago, but now at least there's a man page for HAMMER2.

The first alpha release of GhostBSD 10.1 is now available, which is based on PC-BSD and FreeBSD. This BSD operating system also desires to deliver a first-rate desktop experience while setting it apart is the use of the GNOME2-forked MATE desktop environment by default.

AsiaBSDCon 2015 happened last week in Tokyo, Japan. Besides learning about OpenBSD's custom-built HTTP/web server, there was also a presentation entitled "OpenBSD Sucks" by one of the OpenBSD developers.

With the upcoming release of OpenBSD 5.7 in May, nginx is being removed from the OpenBSD base package set in favor of using OpenBSD's own, home-grown web-server by default.

The FreeBSD kernel finally has support for USB-based DisplayLink graphics adapters.

The PC-BSD developers have shared some of the upcoming features for their next release, PC-BSD 10.1.2. While it's just a point release on top of FreeBSD, PC-BSD continues adding a lot of interesting, desktop-oriented innovations to their BSD distribution.

The OpenBSD Foundation is supporting work to adapt at least one web browser's JIT engine to support OpenBSD's "Write Xor Execute" policy for system memory.

Last month the Intel DRM driver on DragonFlyBSD was ported to match the upstream Linux 3.10 level of support and features after being based on Linux 3.9 previously in their porting of this open-source Intel graphics driver to BSD. The Radeon DRM driver is in the process of a similar bump with the DragonFlyBSD kernel catching up to this AMD Radeon kernel graphics driver from its Linux 3.10 state.

The PC-BSD developers behind the original Lumina Desktop Environment have put out a new "spit and polish" release of Lumina.

It was fixed and subsequently reported yesterday that the FreeBSD kernel has been subject to a faulty random number generator for the past four months.

For anyone that in the past decade has looked for an embedded firewall/network operating system to build your own router or network device has likely encountered m0n0wall. While m0n0wall has been popular over the years and is powered by FreeBSD, the lead developer of m0n0wall has tossed in the towel after twelve years in development.

The PC-BSD camp has started spinning development images of FreeBSD/PC-BSD 11.0 in the present 11.0-CURRENT state that is still far out from being officially released.

EdgeBSD remains one of the newer BSD distributions that is a fork of NetBSD but switches from CVS to Git for source code management.

Version 10.1.1 of PC-BSD is now available with a variety of notable improvements to this FreeBSD-based desktop-focused distribution.

Back when DragonFlyBSD's HAMMER2 file-system development began being publicized, it was believed it wasn't going to be ready until at least 2013. Fast forward two years, HAMMER2 isn't yet used by default on this BSD operating system and it's still being actively developed.

While FreeBSD, DragonFlyBSD, OpenBSD, and other BSD distributions have made much headway in the past year or two in porting the Linux DRM/KMS drivers to their kernels, the work still measurably lags behind the latest upstream Linux kernel code.

Chris Buechler has released version 2.2 of the pfSense FreeBSD-based firewall/router focused software platform.

While DragonFlyBSD 4.0.2 was released just two weeks ago, the v4.0.3 update is now out.

Besides working toward PC-BSD 10.1.1's release, the PC-BSD crew have also been working on improving their Lumina Desktop Environment.

The PC-BSD crew that base their desktop-focused BSD operating system off of FreeBSD put out their 10.1.1. release candidate this week.

The FreeBSD Foundation has issued their latest quarterly status report for covering from October to December 2014.

Users of DragonFlyBSD on the desktop (or otherwise using sound on this popular BSD platform) will benefit from the next major update of the operating system.

DragonFlyBSD 4.0 was released back in November with a variety of improvements while today the v4.0.2 point release is out to take care of some issues.

ZFS is commonly viewed as the next-generation, high-end file-system for BSD systems while DragonFlyBSD defaults to their own HAMMER file-system designed by Matthew Dillon. For those wondering though how ZFS compares to HAMMER, here's a comparison.

Over the past week or so I've shared many top ten / year-end lists of our most popular open-source content on Phoronix. Most of the focus has been on our majority Linux focus while in this article is a look at the top ten BSD articles on Phoronix from 2014.

The 2015Q1 quarterly snapshot for FreeBSD Ports was branched today.

Version 2.1.2 of LibreSSL, the OpenSSL fork by the OpenBSD crew, is now available with a variety of new work.

Back in 2012 OpenBSD got forked as Bitrig and as of this week the initial release is finally available.

Jordan Hubbard, the co-founder of FreeBSD and CTO of iXsystems, gave a talk at this month's MeetBSD California 2014 conference about the next ten years of FreeBSD.

The much anticipated release of DragonFlyBSD 4.0 is now available.

While Linux/Android on AArch64 is what's usually talked about, FreeBSD developers continue making progress on porting their kernel to 64-bit ARM.

The FreeBSD has received their largest ever single donation: $1,000,000 USD.

Following in the foot steps of the FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE, PC-BSD 10.1-RELEASE is now available along with the server-oriented TrueOS spin.