FreeBSD 13.0-RC1 Released With TCP Performance Improvement, Other Fixes

With plans of formally releasing FreeBSD 13.0 at month's end, FreeBSD 13.0-RC1 is available this weekend and on-schedule for helping to test and evaluate this forthcoming major BSD operating system update.

Over the prior betas, FreeBSD 13.0-RC1 has a TCP performance improvement when using TCP_NOOPT, SCTP fixes and improvements, and a variety of other low-level fixes and improvements. But at this stage most of the additions are mundane.

More broadly though with FreeBSD 13.0 compared to FreeBSD 12.2 there is much better Intel CPU performance, improvements to the FreeBSD Update utility, efibootmgr as FreeBSD's EFI bootloader picked up a number of new features, the Bhyve virtualization stack continues piling on more features, and the networking subsystem continues seeing plenty of work as one of FreeBSD's strong areas. For FreeBSD 13.0 on i386, the default CPU type has shifted from i486 to i686, thus now requiring 686-class CPUs at a minimum. There are also many other improvements throughout kernel and user-space with FreeBSD 13.0, which is quite an exciting update. We'll have more tests on FreeBSD 13.0 when the official release is out around 30 March.

More details and downloads on this weekend's FreeBSD 13.0 release candidate can be found via FreeBSD.org.

Two more release candidates are scheduled over the next two weeks before proceeding to FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE.