BSD News Archives

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

There's an active discussion this week about making Wayland support available by default on FreeBSD.

While Linux is our predominant focus at Phoronix, a special place in our heart remains for the BSDs. Here's a look back at the most popular BSD operating system articles on Phoronix this year.

The FreeBSD-based operating system TrueOS that's formerly known as PC-BSD has put out their last stable update of 2017.

FreeNAS 11.1 is now available as the latest feature update to this popular FreeBSD-based Network Attached Storage (NAS) operating system.

OpenBSD has graduated its 64-bit ARM (ARM64) architecture to being officially supported.

The NetBSD operating system has been working on updating their DTrace and ZFS implementations.

DragonFlyBSD now supports up to 64TB of physical memory.

The TrueOS BSD folks working on their Qt5-powered Lumina Desktop Environment have issued a new feature update of their open-source desktop.

GhostBSD 11.1 is now available as the BSD operating system derived from FreeBSD 11.1 while catering to Xfce and MATE desktop experiences.

GhostBSD 11.1-RC1 was released on Monday as the final test release before shipping this official update of the Xfce/MATE-desktop oriented FreeBSD 11.1 derivative.

DragonFlyBSD 5.0.1 was released this morning as the first point release to the big DragonFlyBSD 5.0 version that debuted initial HAMMER2 file-system support.

Today marks the official availability of DragonFlyBSD 5.0.

There's a new version available of pfSense, the popular BSD-based operating system common to network appliances / firewalls / routers.

OpenBSD 6.2 has managed to release a few days ahead of schedule.

Not only is the Ubuntu 17.10 release imminent, but so is that of OpenBSD 6.2.

LibertyBSD 6.1 is now available as a deblobbed version of OpenBSD.

The latest release in the FreeBSD 10 series is now available with some work backported from FreeBSD 11 and other improvements/fixes.

FreeBSD 12.0 will have initial support for ZFS Channel Programs (ZCP) for running administrative tasks on the file-system via Lua.

We've known a new DragonFlyBSD release was being worked on for release soon. That release has now been branched, the first release candidate tagged, and it's being marked as version 5.0.

More than three years after the initial release of KDE Plasma 5 for Linux, the support on FreeBSD is getting into shape.

OpenSSH 7.6 will be hitting the streets soon.

DragonFlyBSD today picked up direct input support within the kernel's polling code. This can boost the networking performance though for now is just supported by the IX4 driver, what is used as the Intel 10Gb Ethernet driver.

Matthew Dillon has been very busy the past few weeks getting his HAMMER2 file-system ready for an experimental debut in the next DragonFlyBSD release.

One of the interesting Google Summer of Code projects within the BSD realm this summer was working on a new boot management tool and library for ZFS on FreeBSD. It's still in the works, but progress is being made.

While Linux users of AMD's new Zen-based Ryzen/Threadripper/Epyc processors are still waiting for thermal driver support to hit the mainline Linux kernel, FreeBSD developers have already managed to produce the Zen "Family 17h" CPU thermal monitoring support on their own.

Following the AMD Threadripper Linux tests of this week today I finally had a chance to try out some of the BSDs with this 16 core / 32 thread system.

For those interested in the work being done to the HAMMER2 file-system that's being developed by Matthew Dillon for DragonFlyBSD, it is indeed getting closer to being a working reality.

Version 2.4 of the pfSense BSD-based firewall/router operating system is nearing and the release candidate is out this week for testing.

After the HAMMER2 file-system was announced back in 2012, the next DragonFlyBSD release likely to be released in September will offer experimental support for this next-generation HAMMER file-system.

For those riding the FreeBSD 10 train and not yet prepared to jump on over to FreeBSD 11 with its recent v11.1 release, there is FreeBSD 10.4 being worked on.

Matthew Dillon began developing the HAMMER2 file-system in 2012 and back then he talked about it being until at least 2013 when it would be usable, etc. Five years later, it's looking like HAMMER2 is closer to being usable on DragonFlyBSD systems.

Separate from the AMD Ryzen performance marginality problem affecting Linux users, BSD users have been working on a workaround for their kernels to address problems with how their user stacks are mapped.

While TrueOS (formerly PC-BSD) is arguably the most well known desktop variant of FreeBSD, GhostBSD has been gaining ground as well as a FreeBSD-based desktop-friendly operating system. Today marks the availability of GhostBSD 11.1 Alpha.

DragonFlyBSD 4.8.1 has been released by Justin Sherrill with various minor updates -- particularly for Intel DRM graphics and other kernel improvements -- over the recent v4.8 milestone.

OpenBSD is now the latest BSD switching from GCC to LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler by default.

A big update is available today of OPNsense, the fork of pfSense that serves as a FreeBSD-based network operating system / firewall.

Bitrig, the operating system that forked OpenBSD back in 2012, is no longer being developed.

The TrueOS BSD distribution has finished porting over more than one thousand FreeBSD RC scripts into OpenRC format for this dependency-based init system.

FreeBSD 11.1 is now available as the first point release to FreeBSD 11.

FreeBSD 11.1 remains on track for releasing later this month.

The latest quarterly update to the pkgsrc cross-platform package manager is now available with a variety of new packages as well as some infrastructure improvements.

FreeBSD developers have announced the second release candidate of the upcoming FreeBSD 11.1.

The first release candidate for FreeBSD 11.1 is now available for testing.

TrueOS-aligned Lumina Desktop Environment 1.3 is now available as the latest stable release for this Qt-powered desktop environment.

The third beta for the upcoming FreeBSD 11.1 is available for testing this weekend.

FreeNAS 11.0 is now officially available, the network attached storage (NAS) centered operating system powered by FreeBSD.

The first beta for FreeBSD 11.1 is out right on schedule.

NetBSD developers are preparing to release the version "8.0" of their operating system in the near future.

TrueOS, the FreeBSD-derived operating system formerly known as PC-BSD, is out with a six-month stable release update.