FreeBSD

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.

Boot options

The operating system provides users with a text-mode, minimal boot menu from where they can boot into the multi user or single user environments, drop to a shell prompt for system rescuing tasks, choose a stable or old kernel, as well as to reboot the machine.

Additionally, you can configure various boot options, such as support for ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface), safe mode, single user and verbose. After the system boots, you will be asked if want to install the distribution of use the live environment.

Bottom line

Summing up, FreeBSD is without no doubt an advanced operating system that powers some of the most modern desktop, server and embedded systems around the world. Thanks to its state-of-the-art security and advanced features, FreeBSD is used by a plethora of powerful companies to deliver modern services, as well as to respond to changing needs and demands.

What is new in this release:

• Clang, LLVM, LLD, LLDB, and libc++ have been updated to version 4.0.0.
• Many third-party (contributed) software updates, such as the Elf Tool Chain, ACPICA, libarchive(3), ntpd(8), unbound(8), and more.
• Support for blacklistd(8) has been added to OpenSSH.
• The zfsbootcfg(8) utility has been added, providing one-time boot.config(5)-style options for zfsboot(8).
• The efivar(8) utility has been added, providing an interface to manage UEFI variables.
• Support for Microsoft0 Hyper-V Generation 2 virtual machines has been added.
• The ena(4) driver has been added, providing support for "next generation" Enhanced Networking on the Amazon0 EC2 platform.
• The NFS client now supports the Amazon0 Elastic File System (EFS).
• The EFI loader can now access remote files via TFTP in addition to NFS as a runtime configuration option.
• ZFS now stores compressed data in cache, improving cache hit rates and performance.
• Several updates to provide build reproducibility.

What is new in version :

• Clang, LLVM, LLD, LLDB, and libc++ have been updated to version 4.0.0.
• Many third-party (contributed) software updates, such as the Elf Tool Chain, ACPICA, libarchive(3), ntpd(8), unbound(8), and more.
• Support for blacklistd(8) has been added to OpenSSH.
• The zfsbootcfg(8) utility has been added, providing one-time boot.config(5)-style options for zfsboot(8).
• The efivar(8) utility has been added, providing an interface to manage UEFI variables.
• Support for Microsoft0 Hyper-V Generation 2 virtual machines has been added.
• The ena(4) driver has been added, providing support for "next generation" Enhanced Networking on the Amazon0 EC2 platform.
• The NFS client now supports the Amazon0 Elastic File System (EFS).
• The EFI loader can now access remote files via TFTP in addition to NFS as a runtime configuration option.
• ZFS now stores compressed data in cache, improving cache hit rates and performance.
• Several updates to provide build reproducibility.

What is new in version 8.4:

• Gnome version 2.32.1, KDE version 4.10.1
• Feature flags 5000 version of the ZFS filesystem.
• Support for all shipping LSI storage controllers.

What is new in version 10.1:

• The new console driver, vt(4), has been added.
• Support for FreeBSD/i386 guests has been added to bhyve(4).
• The bhyve(4) hypervisor now supports booting from a zfs(8) filesystem.
• Support for SMP was added to the armv6 kernels and enabled by default in the configuration files for all platforms that contain multi-core CPUs.
• Initial support for UEFI boot has been added for the FreeBSD/amd64 architecture.
• Support has been added to cache geli(8) passphrases during system boot.
• Support for the UDP-Lite protocol (RFC 3828) has been added to the IPv4 and IPv6 stacks.
• The new filesystem automount facility, autofs(5), has been added.
• The sshd(8) rc.d(8) startup script now generates ED25519 sshd(8) host keys if keys do not already exist when ssh_keygen_alg() is invoked.
• OpenSSH has been updated to version 6.6p1.
• The nc(1) utility has been updated to match the version in OpenBSD 5.5.
• Sendmail has been updated to 8.14.9.
• The unbound(8) caching resolver and ldns have been updated to version 1.4.22.
• OpenPAM has been updated to Ourouparia (20140912).
• OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.0.1j.
• The pkg(8) package management utility has been updated to version 1.3.8.

What is new in version 10.1 RC3:

• Several fixes to the UDPLite protocol implementation.
• The vt(4) driver has been updated to save and restore keyboard mode and LED states when switching windows.
• Several fixes to the SCTP protocol implementation.
• A potential race condition in obtaining a file pointer has been corrected.
• Fix ZFS ZVOL deadlock and rename issues.
• Restore libopie.so ABI compatibility with 10.0-RELEASE.
• Removed the last vestige of MD5 password hashes.
• Several rc(8) script updates and fixes.
• bsdinstall(8) has been updated to allow selecting local_unbound in the default services to enable at first boot.
• Prevent ZFS leaking pool free space.
• Fix rtsold(8) remote buffer overflow vulnerability. [SA-14:20]
• Fix routed(8) remote denial of service vulnerability. [SA-14:21]
• Fix memory leak in sandboxed namei lookup. [SA-14:22]
• OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.0.1j. [SA-14:23]
• Fix an issue where a FreeBSD virtual machine provisioned in the Microsoft Azure service does not recognize the second attached disk on the system.

What is new in version 10.1 RC2:

• Fix XHCI driver for devices which have more than 15 physical root HUB ports.
• Fix old iSCSI initiator to work with new CAM locking.
• Fix page length reported for Block Limits VPD page.
• Add QCOW v1 & v2 support to mkimg(1).

What is new in version 10.1 RC1:

• A bug that would cause all processes to appear to have the parent PID of '1' has been fixed.
• Various updates to bsdinstall(8) and bsdconfig(8).
• The Hyper-V KVP (key-value pair) driver has been added, and enabled by default on amd64 and i386 architectures.

What is new in version 10.1 Beta 3:

• Support for serial and null console has been added to the UEFI boot loader.
• A potential panic triggered by referencing a device that has been renamed has been fixed in the cam(4) subsystem.
• OpenPAM has been updated to the Ourouparia (20140912) release.
• New sysctls have been added to vt(4) to enable or disable potentially dangerous key combinations (such as reboot, halt, and break to debugger).
• The mkimg(1) utility has been updated to allow creating empty partition entries.
• The GEOM_ELI class will now cache passphrases for disk decryption, which allows the system to boot after the first passphrase entry if the remaining disks on the system use the same passphrase.
• Support for controlling mfi(4) controller properties has been added to mfiutil(8).
• The /usr/lib32/compat shared library directory has been added to the default ld-elf32.so.1 path.
• Use of "no" for a Norwegian keymap file is now permitted in rc.conf(5).
• Several bug fixes to autofs(5) have been implemented.

What is new in version 10.0:

• GCC is no longer installed by default on architectures where clang is the default compiler.
• Unbound has been imported to the base system as the local caching DNS resolver.
• BIND has been removed from the base system.
• make has been replaced with bmake, obtained from the NetBSD Project.
• pkg is now the default package management utility.
• pkg_add(1), pkg_delete, and related tools have been removed.
• Major enhancements in virtualization, including the addition of bhyve(8), virtio(4), and native paravirtualized drivers providing support for FreeBSD as a guest operating system on Microsoft Hyper-V.
• TRIM support for Solid State Drives has been added to ZFS.
• Support for the high-performance LZ4 compression algorithm has been added to ZFS.

What is new in version 10.0 RC4:

• Tighten default restrictions for ntpd(8) server.
• Fix kernel crash discovered with recent Java port update.

What is new in version 10.0 Beta 4:

• Add preliminary support for RTL8106E, RTL8168G, RTL8168GU, RTL8411B, and RTL8168EP.
• Enable fingerprint checking in pkg(8) for FreeBSD-provided binary packages.
• Remove the WITH_LIBICONV_COMPAT build option.
• Update nvi to 2.1.2.
• Various iconv(3) fixes.
• Fix mergemaster -U by forcing FreeBSD 9 compatiblity in mtree when mtree is nmtree.
• Fix to freebsd-update(8) in generating the list of old files/directories versus new files/directories (FreeBSD-EN-13:05.freebsd-update).

What is new in version 9.2:

• The ZFS filesystem now supports TRIM when used on solid state drives.
• The virtio(4) drivers have been added to the GENERIC kernel configuration for amd64 and i386 architectures.
• The ZFS filesystem now supports lz4 compression.
• OpenSSL has been updated to version 0.9.8y.
• DTrace hooks have been enabled by default in the GENERIC kernel.
• DTrace has been updated to version 1.9.0.
• Sendmail has been updated to version 8.14.7.
• OpenSSH has been updated to version 6.2p2.
• Import unmapped I/O support from head/.

What is new in version 10.0 Alpha 2:

• Add -stdlib=libstdc++ to CXXFLAGS when building libstdc++ and libsupc++ with clang.
• Fix an issue that caused Integrated RAID volumes on LSI mps(4) controllers to not get scanned on boot.
• Fix a panic during pageout observed on some powerpc64 systems.
• Import Hyper-V paravirtualized drivers from projects/hyperv branch.
• Add the new iSCSI target an initiator (iscsictl(8)).
• Add the vmx(4) driver to amd64 and i386 GENERIC kernels.
• Various fixes to the drm/radeon driver.
• Various updates to the unbound import.

What is new in version 9.2 Beta 2:

• Fix an interoperability problem between FreeBSD NFS Server (version 4) and Linux NFS (version 4) clients.
• Fix nvme(4) and nvd(4) to support non 512-byte sector sizes.
• Fix freebsd-update(8) for -BETA2 by removing a file with non-POSIX characters in its name. This file is not needed for FreeBSD builds, and caused freebsd-update(8) to error on -BETA1.
• Fix an XHCI regression.
• Fix a bug in ipv6_prefix_IF.
• Fix address range specification with various ifconfig(8) options.
• Fix Denial of Service vulnerability in named(8). (SA FreeBSD-SA-13:07.bind)

What is new in version 9.0:

• The FreeBSD kernel now supports Capsicum Capability Mode. Capsicum is a set of features for sandboxing support, using a capability model in which the capabilities are file descriptors. Two new kernel options CAPABILITIES and CAPABILITY_MODE have been added to the GENERIC kernel. For more information about Capsicum, see http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/.[r219129]
• The hhook(9) (Helper Hook) and khelp(9) (Kernel Helpers) KPIs have been implemented. These are a kind of superset of pfil(9) framework for more general use in the kernel. The hhook(9) KPI provides a way for kernel subsystems to export hook points that khelp(9) modules can hook to provide enhanced or new functionality to the kernel. The khelp(9) KPI provides a framework for managing khelp(9) modules, which indirectly use the hhook(9) KPI to register their hook functions with hook points of interest within the kernel. These allow a structured way to dynamically extend the kernel at runtime in an ABI preserving manner.[r216758, r216615]
• A new resource accounting API has been implemented. It can keep per-process, per-jail, and per-loginclass resource accounting information. Note that this is not built nor installed by default. To build and install them, specify options RACCT in the kernel configuration file and rebuild the base system as described in the FreeBSD Handbook.[r220137]
• A new resource-limiting API has been implemented. It works in conjunction with the RACCT resource accounting implementation and takes user-configurable actions based on the set of rules it maintains and the current resource usage. The rctl(8) utility has been added to manage the rules in userland. Note that this is not built nor installed by default. To build and install them, specify options RCTL in the kernel configuration file and rebuild the base system as described in the FreeBSD Handbook.[r220163]
• [powerpc] FreeBSD/powerpc now supports Sony Playstation 3 using the OtherOS feature available on firmwares 3.15 and earlier.[r217044]
• [amd64, i386] The FreeBSD usb(4) subsystem now supports USB 3.0 by default.[r223098]
• The FreeBSD usb(4) subsystem now supports USB packet filter. This allows to capture packets which go through each USB host controller. The implementation is almost based on bpf(4) code. The userland program usbdump(8) has been added.[r215649]
• A bxe(4) driver for Broadcom NetXtreme II 10GbE controllers (BCM57710, BCM57711, BCM57711E) has been added.[r219647]
• A cxgbe(4) driver for Chelsio T4 (Terminator 4) based 10Gb/1Gb adapters has been added.[r218794]
• The em(4) driver has been updated to version 7.3.2.[r219753]
• The igb(4) driver has been updated to version 2.2.5.[r223350]
• The igb(4) driver now supports Intel I350 PCIe Gigabit Ethernet controllers.[r218530]
• The ixgbe(4) driver has been updated to version 2.3.8.[r217593]
• The re(4) driver now supports RTL8168E/8111E-VL PCIe Gigabit Ethernet controllers and RTL8401E PCIe Fast Ethernet controllers.[r217498, r218760]
• A vte(4) driver for RDC R6040 Fast Ethernet controllers, which are commonly found on the Vortex86 System On a Chip, has been added.[r216829]
• A vxge(4) driver for the Neterion X3100 10GbE Server/Storage adapter has been added.[r221167]
• ipfw(8) now supports IPv6 in the fwd action.[r225044]
• ipfw(8) now supports the call and return actions. Upon the call number action, the current rule number is saved in the internal stack and ruleset processing continues with the first rule numbered number or higher. The return action takes the rule number saved to internal stack by the latest call action and returns ruleset processing to the first rule with number greater than that saved number.[r223666]
• For Infiniband support, OFED (OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution) version 1.5.3 has been imported into the base system. Note that this is not built nor installed by default. To build and install them, specify WITH_OFED=yes in /etc/src.conf and rebuild the base system as described in the FreeBSD Handbook.[r219820]
• The FreeBSD TCP/IP network stack now supports IPv4 prefixes with /31 as described in RFC 3021, "Using 31-Bit Prefixes on IPv4 Point-to-Point Links".[r226572]
• The FreeBSD TCP/IP network stack now supports the mod_cc(9) pluggable congestion control framework. This allows TCP congestion control algorithms to be implemented as dynamically loadable kernel modules. The following kernel modules are available as of 9.0-RELEASE: cc_chd(4) for the CAIA-Hamilton-Delay algorithm, cc_cubic(4) for the CUBIC algorithm, cc_hd(4) for the Hamilton-Delay algorithm, cc_htcp(4) for the H-TCP algorithm, cc_newreno(4) for the NewReno algorithm, and cc_vegas(4) for the Vegas algorithm. The default algorithm can be set by a new sysctl(8) variable net.inet.tcp.cc.algorithm. The value must be set to one of the names listed by net.inet.tcp.cc.available, and newreno is the default set at boot time. For more detail, see the mod_cc(4) and mod_cc(9) manual pages.[r216109, r216114, r216115, r218152, r218153, r218155]
• An h_ertt(4) (Enhanced Round Trip Time) khelp(9) module has been added. This module allows per-connection, low noise estimates of the instantaneous RTT in the TCP/IP network stack with a robust implementation even in the face of delayed acknowledgments and/or TSO (TCP Segmentation Offload) being in use for a connection.[r217806]
• A new tcp(4) socket option TCP_CONGESTION has been added. This allows to select or query the congestion control algorithm that the TCP/IP network stack will use for connections on the socket.[r218912]
• The ng_netflow(4) netgraph(4) node now supports NetFlow version 9. A new export9 hook has been added for NetFlow v9 data. Note that data export can be done simultaneously in both version 5 and version 9.[r219183]
• The geom_map(4) GEOM class has been added. This allows to generate multiple geom providers based on a hard-coded layout of a device with no explicit partition table such as embedded flash storage. For more information, see the geom_map(4) manual page.[r220559]
• The graid(8) GEOM class has been added. This is a replacement of the ataraid(4) driver supporting various BIOS-based software RAID.[r219974]
• A tws(4) driver for 3ware 9750 SATA+SAS 6Gb/s RAID controllers has been added.[r226115]
• The FreeBSD Fast File System now supports softupdates journaling. It introduces a intent log into a softupdates-enabled file system which eliminates the need for background fsck(8) even on unclean shutdown. This can be enabled in a per-filesystem basis by using the -j flag of the newfs(8) utility or the -j enable option of the tunefs(8) utility. Note that the 9.0-RELEASE installer automatically enables softupdates journaling for newly-created UFS file systems.[r207141, r218726]
• The FreeBSD Fast File System now supports the TRIM command when freeing data blocks. A new flag -t in the newfs(8) and tunefs(8) utilities sets the TRIM-enable flag for a file system. The TRIM-enable flag makes the file system send a delete request to the underlying device for each freed block. The TRIM command is specified as a Data Set Management Command in the ATA8-ACS2 standard to carry the information related to deleted data blocks to a device, especially for a SSD (Solid-State Drive) for optimization.[r216796]
• The FreeBSD NFS subsystem has been updated. The new implementation supports NFS version 4 in addition to 2 and 3. The kernel options for the NFS server and client are changed from NFSSERVER and NFSCLIENT to NFSD and NFSCL. sysctl(8) variables which start with vfs.nfssrv. have been renamed to vfs.nfsd.. The NFS server now supports vfs.nfsd.server_max_nfsvers and vfs.nfsd.server_min_nfsvers sysctl(8) variables to specify the maximum and the minimum NFS version number which the server accepts. The default value is set to 3 and 2, respectively.[r221124]
• The FreeBSD ZFS subsystem has been updated to the SPA (Storage Pool Allocator, also known as zpool) version 28. It now supports data deduplication, triple parity RAIDZ (raidz3), snapshot holds, log device removal, zfs diff, zpool split, zpool import -F, and read-only zpool import.[r219089]
• An implementation of iconv() API libraries and utilities which are standardized in Single UNIX Specification has been imported. These are based on NetBSD's Citrus implementation. Note that these are not built nor installed by default. To build and install them, specify WITH_ICONV=yes in /etc/src.conf and rebuild the base system as described in the FreeBSD Handbook.[r219019]
• A readline(3) API set has been imported into libedit. This is based on NetBSD's implementation and BSD licensed utilities now use it instead of GNU libreadline.[r220370]
• The rtsold(8) and rtadvd(8) daemons now support the RDNSS and DNSSL options described in RFC 6106, "IPv6 Router Advertisement Options for DNS Configuration". A rtadvctl(8) utility to control the rtadvd(8) daemon has been added.[r222732, r224006]
• The rtld(1) runtime linker now supports shared objects as filters in ELF shared libraries. Both standard and auxiliary filtering have been supported. The rtld(1) linker's processing of a filter defers loading a filtee until a filter symbol is referenced unless the LD_LOADFLTR environment variable is defined or a -z loadfltr option was specified when the filter was created.[r216695]
• A bug in the tftpd(8) daemon has been fixed. It had an interoperability issue when transferring a large file.[r224536]
• The utmp(5) user accounting database has been replaced by utmpx(3). User accounting utilities will now use utmpx database files exclusively. The wtmpcvt(1) utility can be used to convert wtmp files to the new format, making it possible to read them using the updated utilities.[r202188]
• The zpool(8): utility now supports a zpool labelclear command. This allows to wipe the label data from a drive that is not active in a pool.[r224171]

What is new in version 8.1:

• zfsloader added
• zpool version of ZFS subsystem updated to version 14
• NFSv4 ACL support in UFS and ZFS; support added to cp(1), find(1), getfacl(1), mv(1), and setfacl(1) utilities
• UltraSPARC IV/IV+, SPARC64 V support
• SMP support in PowerPC G5
• BIND 9.6.2-P2
• sendmail updated to 8.14.4
• OpenSSH updated to 5.4p1
• GNOME 2.30.1, KDE 4.4.5

What is new in version 7.2 RC1:

• The first of two planned release candidates for the FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE cycle is now available. Testing of some of the recent work would be particularly appreciated. This includes: bce(4) updated (there is a report that lagg(4) does not work after the update, fixing that may need to be done as an errata notice after the release); testing of the threading libraries; amr(4) should be fixed. A fix for the 'vm_page_insert: page already inserted' panics has been committed to RELENG_7_1 this morning so it missed the 7.2-RC1 builds. If you wind up being hit by that you can try a normal source based update to the current state of RELENG_7_1 and that problem should go away.

What is new in version 7.2 Beta 1:

• Testing of two recent changes to the system would be particularly valuable. The bce(4) network driver was updated a few days ago. And some significant work was done on the threading libraries a short time ago that is known to fix several major issues but testing to see if it introduced any regressions would be appreciated.

What is new in version 7.1 RC1:

• FreeBSD 7.1-RC1 is now available, the first of the release candidates. There will be at least one more release candidate before the release so the release itself is likely around three weeks from now - if no new show-stoppers are uncovered during testing. In addition to general testing, we're looking for information about potential problems with the boot loader. And a late arrival that's not possible to test without the packages, sysinstall's issues with excessive disc swapping when installing large sets of packages off the CDROMs should be fixed. Testing to make sure that's working would be appreciated.

What is new in version 7.1 Beta 2:

• As the next step in the release cycle for FreeBSD 7.1 builds for FreeBSD 7.1-BETA2 are now available for testing. The ISO images and FTP install trees are available on the FreeBSD mirror sites. The amd64 and i386 sets include a preliminary set of packages, not what is expected to be included with the release itself. The biggest change is that kde-lite was used this time, while the full kde3 will most likely be used for the release. If you would like to do a source-based update to 7.1-BETA2 from an already installed machine you can update your tree to RELENG_7 using normal cvsup/csup methods. The freebsd-update utility supports binary upgrades of i386 and amd64 systems running earlier FreeBSD releases.