FreeBSD 13.4-RC2 Brings Improvements For AMD Phoenix SoCs

FreeBSD 13.4 is due out in just over one week's time while this weekend brought FreeBSD 13.4-RC2 as the last planned test candidate.

Being late in the development cycle there aren't too many changes to find with FreeBSD 13.4-RC2. The 13.4-RC2 release brings improved documentation for updating the UEFI bootloader and then better support for AMD Ryzen 7 "Phoenix" processors.

The improved AMD Ryzen "Phoenix" support in FreeBSD 13.4 is having support for these CPUs within the AMDSMN and AMDTEMP drivers. The AMDSMN driver is used for the System Management Network bus with AMD Zen processors. AMDTEMP as clear from the name is used for reporting the on-die thermal sensor data for obtaining the CPU core temperatures.

It's unfortunate that it took so long for the FreeBSD 13 series to see these AMD Phoenix laptops that have been out for over a year now, but better late then never. This also follows AMD beginning to better collaborate with the FreeBSD Foundation.

Beyond just this week's changes for 13.4-RC2, FreeBSD 13.4 has a number of minor updates coming to the operating system. There are several driver updates like to the Intel ICE Ethernet network driver and IRDRMA drivers. The LLVM/Clang compiler has been updated to LLVM 18.1.5 and there are also a number of other package updates such as SQLite 3.46 and OpenSSH 9.7p1. The in-progress FreeBSD 13.4 release notes can be found on FreeBSD.org.

Look for FreeBSD 13.4-RELEASE to be announced around 10 September.