FreeBSD Working On A New Installer, Updates To Their Linux Compatibility Layer
It was another busy quarter for this leading BSD in having FreeBSD 13.0 out the door and making progress on a number of large development efforts. Among the FreeBSD accomplishments for Q2-2021 were:
- There is "rough proof-of-concept" work on a new FreeBSD installer. The goal is to ultimately succeed the current bsdinstall. This new experimental installer is web-based with the interface running from a web browser either locally on the machine seeing the FreeBSD installation or can be opened up on a remote system. This web-based installer would offer a modern user-interface that is more concise and easier to use than the current installer. The new installer is also more modular and make it easier too for more scripted/automated installations.
- The FreeBSD Foundation facilitated work on VirtIO 1.0 modern support in Bhyve, AMD PCI passthrough fixes in VMM, UFS bug fixes, on-demand coredump generation by the kernel via ptrace(PT_COREDMP), general kernel debugging improvements, and more.
- There is work on updating their drm-kmod graphics driver code from the state of the graphics drivers in the Linux 5.7 kernel in order to support newer AMD Radeon and Intel graphics hardware.
- A variety of improvements to FreeBSD's Linux compatibility layer for running Linux binaries on FreeBSD.
- FreeBSD Release Engineering Team shipped FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE.
- Ports now has more than 44,200 ports/packages available.
- Work on getting libglvnd (GLVND) in use on FreeBSD for OpenGL vendor neutral dispatch layer for similar benefits to its usage on Linux when dealing with different driver stacks (e.g. Mesa and NVIDIA).
- The helloSystem project as a FreeBSD-powered desktop OS has been progressing nicely with reaching a new release and making progress towards its next version.
More details on the FreeBSD development progress in Q2 via FreeBSD.org.
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