BSD News Archives

For many years it's been possible to run Linux games on FreeBSD along with other Linux applications thanks to FreeBSD's "Linuxulator" Linux binary compatibility layer. With that more recently it's becoming possible to run even more recent games thanks to improvements to FreeBSD's graphics drivers, the Linux binary compatibility code, and other FreeBSD improvements -- Steam is even working out for more titles.

FreeBSD 13.0 was supposed to be out by the end of March but a bumpy past few weeks has led to extra release candidates. Out this weekend is FreeBSD 13.0-RC5 for what might now be the final test release.

Last week saw FreeBSD 13.0-RC3 released as an "extra" build due to the fallout from the last minute WireGuard situation. Due to other bugs, FreeBSD 13.0-RC4 was issued today rather than going for the final release.

A third and final release candidate of FreeBSD 13.0 was warranted ahead of its formal 13.0-RELEASE later this month.

It's been a while since hearing much about Wayland efforts on FreeBSD, but it turns out the Sway i3-inspired Wayland compositor can run on this BSD after a number of setup steps. However, the likes of KDE Plasma on Wayland still aren't working well outside of Linux.

Towards the end of last year FreeBSD imported a WireGuard kernel module. That initial WireGuard port to FreeBSD was found to be of poor code quality and made without much involvement from upstream WireGuard developers. That FreeBSD WireGuard kernel code is now in the process of being replaced by a much better implementation.

If all goes well FreeBSD 13.0 will be officially released before the end of the month while out this weekend is the second release candidate for testing.

With plans of formally releasing FreeBSD 13.0 at month's end, FreeBSD 13.0-RC1 is available this weekend and on-schedule for helping to test and evaluate this forthcoming major BSD operating system update.

NomadBSD 1.4 is out today as the latest feature update to this operating system that is one of the BSD-based desktop initiatives.

There has been a lot of attention on helloSystem this week as a macOS-inspired operating system built atop FreeBSD with an emphasis on providing a polished desktop experience. Since we highlighting the FOSDEM presentation about it, there has been a lot of coverage on helloSystem and this weekend marks a new experimental ISO release.

Following last weekend's release of FreeBSD 13 BETA1, the second beta is now available for testing this big BSD operating system update.

While it was a sad blow when PC-BSD/TrueOS stopped pursuing its desktop ambitions as what was arguably the leading BSD desktop operating system out there with a nice end-user experience, since then we have seen efforts like MidnightBSD, GhostBSD, and others fill the avoid with continuing to enhance the out-of-the-box BSD desktop system. A new entrant that is quite interesting is helloSystem that aims to be a "macOS of BSDs" for a polished desktop experience.

FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE is aiming to debut before the end of March and there is good chances of that with the FreeBSD 13.0 release process so far being on schedule. With that, this weekend marks the availability of FreeBSD 13.0-BETA1.

If changes around pfSense land have you looking at other possible open-source firewall/router options, OPNsense that forked from pfSense six years ago is out with its newest feature release.

For those that have been trying to find a desktop-friendly BSD operating system that works smoothly out of the box but haven't yet found the perfect match, NomadBSD 1.4-RC1 is now available for improving this desktop-minded FreeBSD-derived open-source operating system.

Netgate has announced pfSense as a rebranded and improved edition of this popular BSD-based firewall/network OS platform.

The domination of the open-source WireGuard secure VPN tunnel not only on Linux systems but BSDs too... WireGuard is now available on pfSense, the FreeBSD-based firewall/router focused software platform.

While 2021 may be the year that some desktop Linux distributions begin using PipeWire by default as the next-generation replacement to the likes of PulseAudio and JACK, for upstream PulseAudio this week it's finally seeing better/restored support for FreeBSD. PulseAudio has merged a set of patches long available via FreeBSD Ports and the like to improve the BSD audio experience.

The FreeBSD project today published its Q4-2020 status report concerning all the interesting happenings for this open-source BSD operating system.

The HAMMER2 file-system that has been used by default on DragonFlyBSD for some time has lacked multi-volumes support compared to its former HAMMER1 file-system. But as of this weekend in the latest Git development code, HAMMER2 now has initial support for multiple volumes.

The past several days FreeBSD has been working to complete its migration from their development being done with Subversion to instead using the Git distributed revision control system as used by most other open-source projects.

The momentum of WireGuard continues with FreeBSD now having mainlined their port of this open-source secure VPN tunnel.

GhostBSD 20.11.28 is out as the latest version of this desktop-focused BSD operating system based on FreeBSD.

For those looking to experiment with some BSD desktop operating systems this weekend, FreeBSD-based MidnightBSD 2.0 is out along with NetBSD-based os108 9.1.

FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE is now available as the latest feature and bug fix update to the FreeBSD 12 platform ahead of the expected FreeBSD 13.0 release around the end of Q1-2021.

The FreeBSD project has published their Q3-2020 report on the state of this leading BSD operating system.

OpenBSD 6.8, NetBSD 9.1, and now TrueNAS 12.0 is out... It seems to be BSD release week!

Not only is there a new OpenBSD release this week but the NetBSD crew also issued a big update in the form of NetBSD 9.1.

It was in October 1995 that Theo de Raadt began the OpenBSD project as a fork of NetBSD 1.0 following his resignation from the NetBSD core development team. Now twenty-five years later OpenBSD 6.8 has been released for marking the 25th anniversary of this popular BSD distribution.

It's 2020 and NetBSD has changed its default X11 window manager after more than two decades with TWM.

Version 8.4 of OpenSSH has been released and among its wide assortment of changes is a lot of continued work on FIDO/2FA key handling.

DragonFlyBSD 5.8.2 is out today as the latest stable version of this popular BSD operating system.

The second beta of the forthcoming FreeBSD 12.2 is now available with a fair number of prominent changes accumulating over the past week.

FuryBSD 2020-Q3 is out as the newest quarterly feature release to this BSD distribution built atop FreeBSD and focused on providing a pleasant desktop experience and one that can function as a LiveDVD for trying out the desktop BSD without installation.

While FreeBSD 13 is aiming for release around March of 2021, FreeBSD 12.2 is on the way for releasing next month as the next stable installment.

Following ongoing work for over a year on moving to OpenZFS for FreeBSD's ZFS file-system support, FreeBSD HEAD overnight has imported the OpenZFS code-base.

For those wanting to experiment with an actively-maintained BSD-powered, desktop-focused operating system, GhostBSD remains a great choice powered off FreeBSD.

DragonFlyBSD has been generally working out well for AMD Zen systems sans a few motherboard specific woes, but now is getting even better thanks to importing some new drivers from FreeBSD.

DragonFlyBSD developer François Tigeot continues his trek of near single-handedly porting the Intel and Radeon DRM graphics driver code from the Linux kernel to this BSD.

One of many interesting Google Summer of Code 2020 projects is working on automated benchmarking for NetBSD in order to allow for performance/regression testing of this BSD operating system known for its portability across CPU architectures.

While DragonFlyBSD has its own, original HAMMER2 file-system, for those needing to access data from EXT2/EXT3/EXT4 file-systems, there is a brand new "ext2fs" driver implementation for this BSD operating system.

Longtime FreeBSD/Linux network stack developer and former Qualcomm Atheros engineer Adrian Chadd is back to working on FreeBSD wireless networking improvements.

The FreeBSD project has published their Q2'2020 status report that outlines their nearly-complete work on migrating from Subversion to Git plus many hardware support improvements for this BSD operating system and more.

As what was formerly FreeNAS, the first beta of TrueNAS CORE 12.0 is available for testing of this BSD-based operating system for NAS devices and other storage setups.

Following WireGuard being merged into Linux 5.6, the attention turned in recent months by WireGuard developers onto seeing their kernel port upstreamed in OpenBSD. As of this weekend, the WireGuard upstreaming in OpenBSD is their latest accomplishment.

For those not on the current FreeBSD 12 stable series but currently relying on FreeBSD 11, the FreeBSD 11.4 stable release is now available.

Following a survey of FreeBSD developers gauging interest in a new Code of Conduct and then a follow-up survey of keeping their current CoC versus adopting one similar to the LLVM or Go projects, FreeBSD has now settled on a new document.

While iXsystems has been known as one of the leading FreeBSD-focused vendors with their various BSD-powered storage devices and servers as well as contributing significantly to upstream FreeBSD in addition to their former work on TrueOS/PC-BSD, they are now developing a new platform called TrueNAS SCALE that is based on Linux.

OpenBSD 6.7 was released this morning as the newest version of this security-minded BSD operating system.

It's arguably long overdue but OpenBSD is seeing initial work on POWERPC64 enablement landing in its source tree.