FreeBSD 10.3 Release, What News on This Version
FreeBSD is an open source and server oriented operating system derived from BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution), the version of UNIX developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It offers advanced networking, performance, security and compatibility features today which are still missing in other operating systems, even some of the best commercial ones.
Distributed as installable or Live CDs for five architectures
The project is distributed as installable only CD ISO image that support the 32-bit/x86 compatible (including Pentium and Athlon), 64-bit/amd64 compatible (including Opteron, Athlon 64, and EM64T), IA-64 (ia64), PPC (PowerPC), and SPARC instruction set architectures.
It is also essential to mention that this operating system is not a Linux distribution, and it features several stable branches. While the 10.x branch delivers all the latest BSD technologies and it is considered the latest stable release, the 9.x and 8.x branches have been classified as legacy releases.
FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE Announcement
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE. This is the third release of the stable/10 branch, which improves on the stability of FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE and introduces some new features.
Some of the highlights:
- The UEFI boot loader received several improvements: It now follows /boot/config and /boot.config files, multi-device boot support works and command line arguments are parsed. Additionally, its framebuffer driver has been enhanced with GOP (Graphics Output Protocol) and UGA (Universal Graphics Adapter) handling, allowing to set the current graphics mode on systems using one of these methods. Moreover, ZFS boot capability has been added to the UEFI boot loader, including support for multiple ZFS Boot Environments (BEs), e. g. those provided by sysutils/beadm.
- The CAM Target Layer ctl(4) now supports High Availability setups.
- The Linux® compatibility layer has been substantially improved and now is capable of running 64-bit applications on amd64 (x86_64), 1:1 threading, VDSO and subset of the epoll(7) family sufficient for the majority of programs.
- The em(4) and igb(4) drivers have been updated to version 7.6.1 and 2.5.3 respectively. Among others, this brings support for i219/i219(2)/i219(3) hardware found with Intel® Skylake generation and newer chipsets.
- The isp(4) driver has been updated and improved: It now also supports 16 Gbps Fibre Channel adapters, has improved target mode support and completed Multi-ID (NPIV) functionality.
- The ixgbe(4) driver has been updated to Intel® FreeBSD Networking Group version 3.1.13-k and support for X552 and X550T was added.
- The initial implementation of reroot support has has been added to the reboot(8) utility, allowing the root file system to be mounted from a temporary source file system without requiring a full system reboot.
- The bsdinstall(8) utility has been updated to allow for creating root-on-ZFS installations on UEFI-based systems in automatic mode.
- The ifconfig(8) utility now reports SFP/SFP+ optics module data when the -v flag is specified and a NIC driver provides such information, i. e. for cxgbe(4), ixgbe(4), mlx5en(4) and sfxge(4).
- The jail(8) utility has been updated to include a new flag, -l, which ensures a clean environment in the target jail. Additionally, jail(8) now runs a shell within the target jail by default when no command was given.
- The mkimg(1) utility has been updated to support NTFS file systems in both GPT and MBR partitioning schemes.
- The xz(1) utility has been updated to version 5.2.2, which provides support for multi-threaded compression.
- GNOME has been updated to version 3.16.2.
- TeXLive has been updated to TL2015.
- Xorg-Server has been updated to version 1.17.4.
- And much more ...
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