BSD News Archives

While it's been on mirrors for a few days, NetBSD 8.0 was officially released this weekend.

The long overdue NetBSD 8.0 operating system update appears ready now to ship.

DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has provided an update on the open-source operating system project's infrastructure and acknowledging the SSD upgrades that are noticeably beneficial over HDDs.

Granted OpenBSD isn't the most desktop focused BSD out there and that WiFi isn't therefore the highest priority for this security-focused operating system, but with the latest code it can now finally auto-join WiFi networks.

The folks at iX Systems have announced their first public beta of FreeNAS 11.2, their downstream of FreeBSD 11.2 focused on supporting network-attached storage (NAS) systems.

The second release candidate of the upcoming NetBSD 8.0 is now available.

Being squared away for the NetBSD 8.1 release are audio improvements within the kernel.

FreeBSD 11.2 is ready to set sail as the first significant FreeBSD update since last July's 11.1 release.

While the Linux support for AMD Ryzen/EPYC processors has been solid on Linux now largely the past number of months with just some exceptions like Raven Ridge display issues, the FreeBSD support has been a bit more choppy.

DragonFlyBSD 5.2.2 is now available as the latest stable release to this popular BSD operating system.

The newest weekly release candidate of the upcoming FreeBSD 11.2 is now available for testing.

Two weeks back we shared the news that one of Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver veterans decided to change roles and is now focused on improving FreeBSD for Intel hardware. Ben Widawsky is working on FreeBSD improvements that can at least relate to Intel and it turns out the company has a new team of developers on the task.

For FreeBSD 12.0-CURRENT in development there is now kernel support for pNFS while the user-space components are landing soon for this Parallel NFS support.

While the DragonFlyBSD kernel has already landed its mitigation for Spectre V1/V2 and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities, a fresh round of CPU bug hardening work was just merged into their kernel.

The second release candidate of FreeBSD 11.2 is now available for testing.

Going back to when TrueOS was known as PC-BSD, the operating system has generally been known as a desktop-friendly version of FreeBSD that currently ships with its own Qt5-powered Lumina Desktop Environment while also having a server installer, etc. The folks working on TrueOS at iXsystems are now planning to take TrueOS into a new direction.

Ahead of its expected release by month's end, FreeBSD 11.2 is now in the release candidate phase of development.

For those of you with some extra time over this US holiday weekend due to Memorial Day, FreeBSD 11.2 Beta 3 is now available for testing.

While DragonFlyBSD 5.3/5.4 is exciting on the performance front for those making use of the stable DragonFly operating system releases, DragonFlyBSD 5.2.1 is available this week.

The second beta release of FreeBSD 11.2 is now available for weekend testing.

FreeBSD 11.2 has reached the beta milestone to succeed FreeBSD 11.1 from last year and ahead of FreeBSD 12.0 that is expected this November.

Following years of work in bringing the KDE Plasma 5 desktop to FreeBSD, it's getting into shape and the x11/kde5 package is now in the ports tree for easing the process of setting up the modern KDE desktop stack.

The Arcan Display Server that is the display stack built off (in part) a game engine and also developing the Durden desktop and most recently developing a "Safespaces" VR Linux desktop has also been working on porting the code from Linux to OpenBSD.

Last week I wrote about the NetBSD 8.0 RC1 images being available and the changes coming in this big update to this popular BSD platform. This morning that official NetBSD 8.0 RC1 announcement was issued.

DragonFlyBSD has implemented a portion of the Linux IRQ subsystem within its kernel.

While in recent months there have been some improvements to FreeBSD that have helped yield greater reliability in running AMD Ryzen processors on this BSD operating system, some users are still reporting hard to diagnose stability problems on FreeBSD.

It looks like the DragonFlyBSD 5.4 release will be delivering at least a few kernel-level performance improvements.

It's a busy month for the BSDs with DragonFlyBSD 5.2 having come along with OpenBSD 6.3 and right before that was TrueOS 18.03. Now there's finally the release candidate of the long-awaited NetBSD 8.0 update.

Besides the fresh BSD/Linux disk performance tests, some other tests I ran on various BSDs and Linux distributions this week was looking at the performance impact of Intel Meltdown CPU vulnerability mitigation on each of them, namely the performance impact of using kernel page-table isolation.

With the recent release of DragonFlyBSD 5.2 one of the prominent changes is HAMMER2 now being considered stable for most use-cases. I've been running some benchmarks of this file-system compared to alternatives on other operating systems and have some FreeBSD / Linux reference points to share.

Besides looking at the HAMMER2 performance in DragonFlyBSD 5.2, another prominent change with this new BSD operating system release is the Spectre and Meltdown mitigations being shipped. In this article are some tests looking at the performance cost of DragonFlyBSD 5.2 for mitigating the Meltdown Intel CPU vulnerability.

In addition to the overhauled/rewritten Windows support, the upcoming Phoronix Test Suite 8.0-Aremark is also featuring much better support for the BSDs. As part of that testing, here are some fresh benchmarks of FreeBSD and TrueOS.

DragonFlyBSD 5.2 is now available as the latest installment of this popular BSD operating system.

OpenBSD 6.3 hadn't been due until the middle of the month, but the official release of this popular BSD operating system is available today.

The crew working on the FreeBSD-derived TrueOS operating system formerly known as PC-BSD have put out a special release of their platform in order to ship the Spectre and Meltdown mitigations.

The first release candidate is now available of the upcoming DragonFlyBSD 5.2 operating system.

While FreeBSD has a Linux compatibility/emulation layer that allows it to run some Linux games, an independent community developer has been working on porting Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4 to FreeBSD.

The HAMMER2 file-system has been available with install-time support since DragonFlyBSD 5.0 while the latest Git code continues to revise this next-generation FS for DragonFly. Landing overnight in DragonFlyBSD were several HAMMER and HAMMER2 improvements.

While id Software founder John Carmack has been known for his open-source and Linux interests over the years and even working on Utah GLX back in the day, he just wrapped up a self-driven "programming retreat" where he was using OpenBSD.

The Qt5-written, BSD-focused Lumina Desktop Environment is receiving a big overhaul with its forthcoming 2.0 release.

A few days back FreeBSD 11 stable was mitigated for Meltdown (and Spectre vulnerabilities), which came more than one month after these nasty CPU vulnerabilities were disclosed while DragonFlyBSD was quickly mitigated and the first of the BSDs to do so. While OpenBSD is known for its security features and focus, only today did it land its initial Meltdown mitigation.

It's now possible to use the graphics/drm-next-kmod port on FreeBSD 11 stable.

Just like the Linux developers, in the wake of the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities DragonFlyBSD developers have also been working on a variety of security improvements.

After hitting the RC phase a few weeks ago, OPNsense 18.1 has been officially released as the latest version of this pfSense-forked network/router-oriented BSD operating system.

While Linux has been playing happily with Ryzen CPUs as long as you weren't affected by the performance marginality problem where you had to swap out for a newer CPU (and Threadripper and EPYC CPUs have been running splendid in all of my testing with not having any worries), it seems the BSDs (at least FreeBSD) are still having some quirks to address.

For fans of the pfSense-forked OPNsense FreeBSD-based firewall/network operating system, the first release candidate of OPNsense 18.1 is available for testing.

Linux, macOS, and Windows has taken most of the operating system attention when it comes down to the recently-disclosed Meltdown vulnerability but the BSDs too are prone to this CPU issue. DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has landed his fixes for Meltdown.

DragonFlyBSD should now have initial support for Intel's latest-generation "Coffee Lake" graphics.

The first point release to NetBSD 7.1 is now available as this BSD operating system ends out 2017.

The FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report covering work done in the third quarter has now been published.