In a report on the development of the FreeBSD project from July to September 2023, several new advancements were highlighted.
A new driver with the implementation of the Squashfs file system was introduced, aiming to improve the efficiency of loading images and firmware based on FreeBSD. SquashFS operates solely in a read-only mode and offers a highly compact representation of metadata and compressed data storage. The driver has been implemented in freebsd 13.2, enabling the loading of Freebsd with FS Squashfs placed in RAM.
Other achievements mentioned in the report include:
- Efforts to enhance the user experience of FreeBSD on desktop systems. Notably, the port desktop-installer now includes the ability to quickly install and configure different user environments or window managers, as well as displaying notifications regarding battery charge levels. Furthermore, the ports Deskutils/QMediamanager, Sysutils/Devd-Mount, and Sysutils/NPMOUNT provide support for mounting connected media and outputting information about the file system and available actions (such as launching a file manager, formatting, copying, or ejecting). The addition of Port deskutils/frebsd-update-notify enables notifications of updates and facilitates automatic installations of updates for the base system, ports, and packages.
- The FreeBSD ports collection has grown from 34,400 to 34,600 ports during the reporting period. The number of unresolved PRs stands at 3,000, with 730 PRs awaiting resolution. The HEAD branch saw 11,454 changes made by 130 developers. Notable updates include Mono 5.20, Perl 5.34,
/Reports, release notes, official announcements.