FreeBSD 13.0 beta testing has begun

Prepared first beta release of FreeBSD 13.0. FreeBSD 13.0-BETA1 Release available for amd64, powerpc64, powerpc64le, powerpcspe, aarch64 and riscv64 architectures … Additionally, images were prepared for virtualization systems (QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, raw) and Amazon EC2 cloud environments. Builds for i386 and 32-bit ARM boards are not generated.

Release Notes with changelog are limited to the empty template for now, but some of the changes previously slated for inclusion in FreeBSD 13.0 include:

  • A transition to a Linux-unified implementation of the ZFS file system from the OpenZFS project has been made. Among the features that became available in FreeBSD after the transition to OpenZFS: an extended quota system, encryption of data sets, separate selection of allocation classes, the use of vector processor instructions to speed up the implementation of RAIDZ and calculating checksums, support for the ZSTD compression algorithm, mode multihost (MMP, Multi Modifier Protection), improved command line toolkit, fixes many bugs related to race conditions and blocking.
  • The code with the implementation of the WireGuard VPN driver and toolkit has been accepted into the kernel and user environment.
  • Added the ability to build the base FreeBSD system in environments based on other operating systems. The need to build on other operating systems is driven by the desire to use Linux or macOS-specific continuous integration tools for testing FreeBSD.
  • A new MMC / SD stack is proposed, based on the CAM framework and allowing connecting devices with an SDIO (Secure Digital I / O) interface. For example, SDIO is used in WiFi and Bluetooth modules for many boards such as the Raspberry Pi 3. The new stack also allows the use of a CAM interface to send SD commands from applications in user space, making it possible to create user-level device drivers.
  • Added support for new boards based on 64-bit ARMv8 CPUs, including Broadcom BCM5871X SoC and NXP LS1046A.
  • A lot of work has been done to improve support for Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) systems.
  • Updated graphics drivers and graphics stack components. Fixed problems with working environments based on the Wayland protocol.
  • Improved liner for compatibility with Linux. DTS (Device Tree Sources) files are synchronized with the Linux 5.8 kernel.
  • Added a TLS (kTLS) implementation running at the FreeBSD kernel level that allows significant encryption performance improvements for TCP sockets.
  • Added support for NFSv4.2 (RFC-7862) and implemented the ability to work NFS over an encrypted communication channel based on TLS 1.3, instead of using Kerberos (sec = krb5p mode), which was limited to encrypting only RPC messages and was implemented only programmatically.
/Media reports.