BSD News Archives

MidnightBSD, the downstream of FreeBSD focused on desktop support and offers the Lumina desktop as well as GNOME 3 and other options, is out with its minor v1.1 update.

The recently releases of FreeBSD 12.0 and DragonFlyBSD 5.4 have been exciting in the BSD space while moving forward there is the NetBSD 9.0 release a ways out on the horizon.

It's been a love affair going on for years, but should you not already know, Netflix has long been leveraging FreeBSD as part of its in-house content delivery network (CDN) for serving its millions of users with on-demand video. This weekend at FOSDEM, Jonathan Looney of the company talked about their usage of FreeBSD.

OPNsense, the FreeBSD-based firewall/router platform forked from m0n0wall, is out with its first release of 2019 and it also marks four years since the original OS release.

With carrying out the ZFS/HAMMER2 vs. Linux ZoL and other file-system benchmarks this weekend, while having those clean installs of each operating system under test, I also took the opportunity to run some other non-storage benchmarks.

The first release candidate is now available for testing of the OPNsense 19.1 FreeBSD-based firewall operating system forked from m0n0wall when it closed up shop four years ago.

While Wayland was designed on and for Linux systems, the BSD support for Wayland and the various compositors has continued improving particularly over the past year or so but it's still a lengthy journey.

The DragonFlyBSD operating system dropped its i386 install support back in 2014 with DragonFlyBSD 4.0 and since then has been focused on x86_64-only. Over the past two years or so they have gutted much of their i386-specific code from their kernel that is no longer needed for today's modern processors while over the weekend they got back to doing some more of that cleansing.

It was recently decided that FreeBSD's ZFS file-system support would be re-based atop ZFS On Linux. That new "ZFS On BSD" implementation based on ZOL continues moving along and it's now easier to test thanks to iX Systems and their TrueOS platform.

GhostBSD 18.12 was released on New Year's Eve as the latest version of this FreeBSD-derived operating system that focuses on delivering a good BSD desktop experience aside from manually installing FreeBSD or any other *BSD and having to manually setup a graphical environment and desktop of your choosing.

While a number of BSDs already have great LLVM toolchain support and are generally quite fond of this liberally licensed compiler alternative to GCC, the NetBSD support has lagged behind a bit for LLVM but that is continuing to improve.

For those not following the BSD operating systems on a daily basis, here is a look back at the biggest highlights in the BSD land for 2018 ranging from OpenBSD's continued security conscious decisions, NetBSD 8.0 bringing USB 3.0 and other hardware support improvements, DragonFlyBSD running great on Threadripper 2, FreeBSD 12.0 making its highly anticipated debut, and much more.

With the newly released DragonFlyBSD 5.4.1 having a lot of HAMMER2 file-system work on top of all of the changes introduced by DragonFlyBSD 5.4 at the start of December, here is a fresh look at the HAMMER versus HAMMER2 file-system performance on this BSD operating system.

Released at the start of December was DragonFlyBSD 5.4 that brought a number of new features and improvements while now v5.4.1 is available that collected a few weeks worth of fixes.

The FreeBSD project is out with their latest status report spanning from January to September 2018. This report covers the bulk of their project changes this year granted not their very latest Q4 happenings, including the release earlier this month of the long-awaited FreeBSD 12.0.

With ZFS On Linux (ZOL) being more actively developed than the ZFS file-system code within the OpenSolaris-derived Illumos kernel, FreeBSD will be transitioning their ZFS file-system kernel driver to be based on ZOL.

While FreeBSD tends to be pretty good about security by default, the HardenedBSD downstream derivative is out with their latest release based upon FreeBSD 12.

With DragonFlyBSD 5.4 having been recently released, development is back onto full-swing in Git master. DragonFlyBSD/HAMMER2 lead developer Matthew Dillon has been landing HAMMER2 file-system improvements that he hopes to back-port to stable in the coming weeks.

FreeBSD 12.0 has made its debut as the latest stable version of this popular BSD operating system.

Good news for those using the LLVM Clang compiler on OpenBSD or DragonFlyBSD: the OpenMP run-time should now be supported with the latest development code.

A new release of the FreeBSD+ZFS-based network attached storage operating system, FreeNAS, is now available for this platform developed by iXsystems.

Cleared from this week's DragonFlyBSD 5.4 release, feature work is resuming on this BSD operating system towards the DragonFlyBSD 5.6 release expected out in about six months based on their usual release cadence. Some early work now staged is updating the Intel DRM/KMS driver for a slew of recent hardware.

Days ahead of the FreeBSD 12.0 release, the long-ago-forked DragonFlyBSD is out with its very exciting 5.4 six-month feature update.

FreeBSD 12.0-RC3 is out as likely the last test release before the official FreeBSD 12.0 debut in the next week.

FreeBSD 12.0 Release Candidate 2 is now available for testing ahead of the official release in December.

Release preparations continue for DragonFlyBSD 5.4 that will officially premiere in the days ahead.

With DragonFlyBSD 5.4 releasing in the days ahead, its code has been branched while now open on Git master is the DragonFlyBSD 5.5 development tree.

After working on the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver for nearly a decade, Ben Widawsky of the Intel Open-Source Technology Center shifted roles to focus on Intel enablement for FreeBSD. In this role over the past several months he has been focusing on FreeBSD power management improvements for Intel hardware.

The FreeBSD desktop with NVIDIA graphics driver support is about to become more viable for gaming with the 64-bit Linux compatibility layer.

DragonFlyBSD developer Justin Sherrill has shared that DragonFlyBSD 5.4 release preparations will begin soon.

The first release candidate of the upcoming FreeBSD 12.0 operating system update is available for testing this weekend.

That extra FreeBSD 12 beta release causing the minor setback to the FreeBSD 12.0 release is now available for testing. There is a fair number of last minute changes in FreeBSD 12.0 Beta 4 release ahead of the imminent branching.

The big FreeBSD 12.0 release still is expected to happen in December but will be a bit later than originally planned.

Another weekly beta release of FreeBSD 12 is now available for testing with the official release still being several weeks out.

One year after the release of GhostBSD 11.1 as a MATE/Xfce-focused FreeBSD-based desktop operating system, GhostBSD 18.10 is now available and it shifts over to a TrueOS base.

Reported at the start of the month were plans for FreeBSD 12 to deprecate many of their 10/100 Ethernet drivers with just leaving the popular fast Ethernet drivers and focusing on Gigabit and beyond networking drivers moving forward.

After a series of alpha releases, FreeBSD 12.0 Beta 1 was issued today to help encourage testing ahead of this operating system update due out in early December.

Adding to the exciting release day is Theo de Raadt releasing OpenBSD 6.4 as the newest version of this BSD operating system known for its security mindfulness.

DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has been quite impressed with AMD's Threadripper 2 processors particularly the Threadripper 2990WX with 32-cores / 64-threads. Dillon has made various optimizations to DragonFly for helping out this processor in past months and overnight he made another significant improvement.

Especially with TrueOS once again taking a new direction, one of the few current BSDs focused on a great desktop experience is MidnightBSD that is about to mark its 1.0 release.

FreeBSD is looking to deprecate "most" of their 10/100 Ethernet drivers in FreeBSD 12 so that they can be dropped entirely in FreeBSD 13, but not everyone wants to see these older networking drivers dismissed.

With the last of the major GCC 8 build issues of the DragonFlyBSD code-base resolved, this BSD operating system has switched to using this latest stable release of the GNU Compiler Collection by default.

While NetBSD 8.0 was released in July with new features like initial USB 3.0 support and UEFI boot-loader support for x86 64-bit hardware, for those not wanting to jump to 8.0 from the 7 series can now enjoy NetBSD 7.2.

Last week I posted some initial tests and benchmarks of DragonFlyBSD/FreeBSD on the AMD Threadripper 2990WX. While that went well and the BSDs scale with this 32-core / 64-thread processor better than Windows, lead DragonFly developer Matthew Dillon had picked up a 2990WX system and has been tuning the kernel ever since. Here are some benchmarks looking at some of his recent optimizations.

With KDE4 not having seen an upstream release in years and the old KDE4 code beginning to break under newer C++ compilers, the KDE-FreeBSD team has announced a four-month deprecation period after which they are dropping the KDE4 ports from the operating system.

DRM is causing a lot of vibrant discussions this week on the FreeBSD mailing list... And no, it's not even Digital Rights Management but rather colorful commentary about their Direct Rendering Manager code and plans for FreeBSD 12.

While it was just days ago that DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon got his hands on a Threadripper 2990WX 32-core / 64-thread "beast", got it working under this long ago forked operating system from FreeBSD, and proceeded to exclaim with joy how powerful this system is, he's now made it even better. Dillon has landed some additional kernel work to benefit the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX.

Last week I carried out some tests of BSD vs. Linux on the new 32-core / 64-thread Threadripper 2990WX. I tested FreeBSD 11, FreeBSD 12, and TrueOS -- those benchmarks will be published in the next few days. I tried DragonFlyBSD, but at the time it wouldn't boot with this AMD HEDT processor. But now the latest DragonFlyBSD development kernel can handle the 2990WX and the lead DragonFly developer calls this new processor "a real beast" and is stunned by its performance potential.

The first alpha release of FreeBSD 12.0 was quietly uploaded a few days ago to the project's download servers as the first step to shipping this next major update to the FreeBSD operating system.

While OpenWRT 18.06 was released today as the popular Linux-based networking/embedded distribution, for those preferring FreeBSD, the OPNsense 18.7 release is also shipping today.