FreeBSD is an open source operating system.
Finally, the new version of FreeBSD 14.0, which arrives after some minor delays and just over two and a half years since the release of FreeBSD 13.0.
FreeBSD 14 is the last series of this project that will have support for 32-bit systems, Therefore, the next version of the system, which will be "FreeBSD 15", will no longer be compatible with 32-bit hardware platforms.
Before moving on to the highlights of this new release, it is important to mention that the FreeBSD version manager has posted a warning about possible issues updating from a previous branch. Additionally, there may be problems with processing changes to master.passwd: since in FreeBSD 14.0 the csh command shell was replaced by sh, parsing changes to /etc/ will prompt you to replace the root user line in /etc/master.passwd, it is mentioned that this change should be rejected, otherwise a line with an empty password will be inserted.
Major New Features in FreeBSD 14
Having already warned about possible update problems from a previous branch, it is time to start with the new features presented in FreeBSD 14 and one of them, as mentioned in the warning above, The default shell for the root user is "sh", which contains a number of new functions designed for interactive use.
Another change that stands out is pFor NVME devices, in which the “nda” driver It is enabled by default on all platforms. To return the old nvd driver, the setting “hw.nvme.use_nvd=1” is provided in loader.conf.
In addition to that, a significant change in FreeBSD 14 is the change to the new default mail delivery agent being dma (DragonFly Mail Agent) instead of sendmail. This change streamlines MTA configuration through mailer.conf, offering users a more modern and efficient email management experience.
It is also highlighted that Added a new “fwget” utility that identifies the hardware you need firmware and install the appropriate firmware packages. Currently, only PCI devices and firmware are supported for Intel and AMD GPUs.
KTLS, adds support for TLS 1.3 hardware acceleration on the receiving side. Speedup is ensured by moving some operations related to processing encrypted packets to the network card side.
Jail gets a boost with the introduction of .include directives, allowing to include additional files whose paths can be masked when loading the configuration. The sysctl security.bsd.see_jail_proc parameter has been expanded, with the help of which unauthorized users in a separate Jail environment can now be prohibited from force termination, changing priority and debugging processes.
On UFS, for configurations where logging is enabled, file system background checks using UFS snapshots are allowed. Additional hash checks have been added to superblocks, cylinder group maps, and inodes to detect corruption.
Added the FIRECRACKER kernel configuration option to allow FreeBSD to run on Firecracker virtualization system, designed to run virtual machines with minimal overhead. The boot time of the FreeBSD 14 kernel running Firecracker has been increased to 25 milliseconds, allowing you to boot FreeBSD environments as needed to deploy a serverless computing infrastructure.
Of the other changes What stands out from FreeBSD 14.0:
- Added tarfs file system, which can be used with zstd-compressed tar files.
- Added a new base64 utility to encode and decode base64 data.
- OpenSSH has been updated to version 9.5p1.
- The rc.d scripts allow the use of the state method, even if the program name (procname) and the PID file are not defined in the script.
- Improved support for NXP DPAA2 (Data Path Acceleration Architecture Gen2) network hardware acceleration architecture.
- Added igc driver for Intel I225 Ethernet Controllers, supporting 2,5Gbps speed.
- The bhyve hypervisor now supports TPM and GPU passthrough.
- FreeBSD supports up to 1024 cores on amd64 and arm64 platforms.
ZFS has been updated to OpenZFS version 2.2, providing significant performance improvements. - It is now possible to perform background file system checks on UFS file systems running with registered soft updates.
- Experimental ZFS images are now available for AWS and Azure.
- The default congestion control mechanism for TCP is now CUBIC.
- Enabled the creation of executable files for 64-bit architectures in PIE (Position Independent Executable) mode.
- The ability to forward access to the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) and GPU (in virtual environments for AMD and Intel chips) has been added to the Bhyve hypervisor.
- The number of supported CPU cores (MAXCPU parameter) on systems based on the amd64 and arm64 architecture has been increased from 256 to 1024.
finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link
Download and Get FreeBSD 14.0
For those interested in being able to obtain the new version, you should know that you can obtain the installation images for the different architectures from the official websiteit in any of your mirrors.