FreeBSD 14.1 Bringing Reproducibly Built Kernels, OpenZFS 2.2.4

Following last week's release of FreeBSD 14.1 Beta 1, this weekend brought the second beta candidate right on time.

FreeBSD 14.1 continues working toward release in mid-June as this point release of the FreeBSD operating system to succeed last November's FreeBSD 14.0. FreeBSD 14.1 is bringing fixes back-ported from FreeBSD 15 development along with other changes like the date program now supporting nanoseconds, updated OpenSSH and other application updates, various device driver updates, and more.

With the new FreeBSD 14.1 Beta 2 release, there are some additional changes tacked on over the past week:

- LLVM/clang/etc update to 18.1.5

- OpenZFS update to 2.2.4

- Bug fix to the adduser utility

- Removal of remnants of portsnap

- Kernels are now built reproducibly.

The LLVM toolchain updates against v18.1.5 upstream are nice, OpenZFS 2.2.4 is good, and it's exciting to see the FreeBSD kernels are now built reproducibly given all the ongoing open-source efforts around reproducible builds and ensuring binaries aren't tampered with or otherwise altered.

Downloads and more details on the FreeBSD 14.1 Beta 2 release via the FreeBSD-Stable mailing list. Look for FreeBSD 14.1 to be officially released around mid-June while until then will be a few more beta and release candidates.