FreeBSD 14.1 Debuts Enhanced Sound Stack & Cloud-Init Support

Altus Intel
Altus Intel
  • Date Time

FreeBSD 14.1 has been released after six months of development, with installation images prepared for various architectures including AMD64, i386, PowerPC, PowerPC64, PowerPC64le, PowerPCSPE, ARMV7, AARCH64, and RISCV64. Additionally, assemblies have been prepared for virtualization systems and cloud environments such as Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, and Vagrant. You can access the release announcement here and download the installation images here.

The main changes in this release are as follows:

  • Improvements have been made to the sound stack, including the implementation of the possibility of disconnecting sound devices in asynchronous mode. The SND_Clone framework and Sysctl parameters have been removed, simplifying the sound subsystem. Instead of separate files for each sound channel, only the main file of the device is now created.
  • Functionality for working with strings and memory in libc has been enhanced using SIMD instructions on systems with AMD64 architecture. Nine functions have been optimized using SIMD, resulting in a 5.54 times increase in performance when processing lines with a size of 64 characters. Read more about this here.
  • Support for using Cloud-Init tools has been added, allowing for system configuration at the loading stage. This includes creating users/groups, adding SSH keys, setting up network connection parameters, and more. The implementation is compatible with OpenStack and many hosting providers. Learn more about Cloud-Init here.
  • Journalization (SOFT UPDATES) has been included for the new UFS2 file systems created by the NEWFS utility.
  • The possibility of assembling the kernel only with support for IPV6 (Inet6), without IPV4 (Inet), has been provided.
  • In the ADDUSER utility used in BSDINSTALL, the creation of a separate ZFS DATASET for a user home catalog has been ensured, if ZFS DATASET is already used for the parent catalog. The ability to use home catalogs with ZFS has also been added.
  • Support for prioritizing processes based on
/Reports, release notes, official announcements.

© 2024 - Altus Intel