After six months of development, the FreeBSD community has announced the availability of the new version of «FreeBSD 13.5", marking the final closure of the 13.x series and paving the way for the evolution of FreeBSD 14.x, whose next update, FreeBSD 14.3, is scheduled for June 3, 2025.
It is mentioned that This update will continue to receive support until April 30, 2026, at which point it will completely give way to the most recent versions of the system.
Major new features and improvements
In this new version of FreeBSD 13.5, various optimizations and improvements have been implemented, among which the following stand out: integration of the sysctl and ip6addrctl tools, allowing configurations to be managed even on isolated systems.
In addition to this, it is now possible modify options default groups ZFS during installation, facilitating the customization of compression parameters and access times.
Utility gstat now allows you to view latency statistics with microsecond accuracy, providing more detailed data on storage performance. It has been introduced AIM support (Adaptive Interrupt Moderation) in the igc and e1000 controllers, optimizing network performance and reducing CPU load on systems with variable packet traffic.
Also the limitation of the year 2038 has been resolved in the UFS1 file system, extending the validity of timestamps until 2106, and the LLVM compiler suite has also been updated to version 19.1.7.
Moreover, support for SFP modules has been improved in the igb driver, along with updates to the Amazon Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) and adaptations for Intel hardware, and drivers for new USB-to-serial devices have been added, in addition to improved compatibility of Purism keyboards with systems using CoreBoot.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- Fixed an issue with name duplication in cd9660 images, improving reliability when handling optical media.
- OCI has been renamed to ORACLE in releng tools. This allows future releng tools to use OCI for Open Container Initiative industry-standard tools, reducing the potential for confusion with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
- The old itr sysctl driver has been removed from the e1000 controller. With the new AIM code, most users are expected to avoid having to configure it manually.
- Fixed duplicate cd9660 directory names. This problem was originally introduced in FreeBSD 14.2-RELEASE, causing cd9660 images to be created with duplicate short (level 2) names in the installer images.
- Added support for Purism coreboot keyboards.
- Realtek 8156/8156B support has been moved from the cdce driver to the ure driver.
- Added support for Brainboxes USB to serial adapters.
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details In the following link.
Download and Get FreeBSD 13.5
For those interested in power Get this new version of FreeBSD 13.5, you should know that it is distributed in images designed for various architectures, ranging from AMD, i386 and multiple PowerPC variants to ARM and RISC-V processors.
Specific builds have also been generated for virtualization and cloud computing environments, with support for Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, and Vagrant, as well as formats compatible with QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw.
Future changes in FreeBSD 15
Last but not least, it is worth mentioning that the next major release of FreeBSD 15 is expected to see significant system compatibility changes, such as:
- Support for 386-bit i32 and PowerPC architectures has been removed, leaving only Armv7 as a 32-bit option.
- Deprecation of the Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) driver, which will affect some older graphics cards.
- Removal of the shar utility, due to security concerns about running self-extracting scripts.
- Additionally, the KDE desktop environment has been removed from the installation images due to conflicts with the OpenSSL 1.1.1 version.