FreeBSD 12.0 Beta 4 Released, Allows NVIDIA Driver To Work With 64-bit Linux Emulation

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.

One change catching our attention are to FreeBSD's linux/linux64 kernel modules for its Linux compatibility code. With changes that had been sought since early 2016, the FreeBSD NVIDIA proprietary driver should now play nicely with the linux64 module. This is necessary for FreeBSD 64-bit CUDA support with NVIDIA's driver. Previously the FreeBSD CUDA support played nicely with 32-bit, but that was dropped in CUDA 9.0. This should help too for other 64-bit Linux emulation code for working with NVIDIA's binary graphics driver.

Other FreeBSD 12.0 Beta 4 changes including support for managing up to 12 fans on POWER hardware (compared to 8 previously), an ICMP buffer underwrite issue has been resolved, and a possible boot issue has been fixed that led to this extra beta release.

More details on this weekend's FreeBSD 12.0 Beta 4 release at FreeBSD.org. Next up are the weekly release candidates until the official stable FreeBSD 12.0 release is ready to be christened around mid-December.