FreeBSD 12 Released (freebsd.org)

New submitter vivekgite writes: The 12th version of the FreeBSD has been released, bringing support for updated hardware. Some of the highlights include: OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.1.1a (LTS). Unbound has been updated to version 1.8.1, and DANE-TA has been enabled by default. OpenSSH has been updated to version 7.8p1. Additonal capsicum(4) support has been added to sshd(8). Clang, LLVM, LLD, LLDB, compiler-rt and libc++ has been updated to version 6.0.1. The vt(4) Terminus BSD Console font has been updated to version 4.46. The bsdinstall(8) utility now supports UEFI+GELI as an installation option. The VIMAGE kernel configuration option has been enabled by default. The NUMA option has been enabled by default in the amd64 GENERIC and MINIMAL kernel configurations. The netdump(4) driver has been added, providing a facility through which kernel crash dumps can be transmitted to a remote host after a system panic. The vt(4) driver has been updated with performance improvements, drawing text at rates ranging from 2- to 6-times faster.

Various improvements to graphics support for current generation hardware. Support for capsicum(4) has been enabled on armv6 and armv7 by default. The UFS/FFS filesystem has been updated to consolidate TRIM/BIO_DELETE commands, reducing read/write requests due to fewer TRIM messages being sent simultaneously. The NFS version 4.1 server has been updated to include pNFS server support. The pf(4) packet filter is now usable within a jail(8) using vnet(9). The bhyve(8) utility has been updated to add NVMe device emulation. The bhyve(8) utility is now able to be run within a jail(8). Various Lua loader(8) improvements. KDE has been updated to version 5.12.

Comments

Linux still playing catch up.

[Seven Spirals]

They still can't seem to get BTRFS working anywhere nearly as well as ZFS on FreeBSD. Plus, you get a lovely init structure with no Systemd garbage. I love it.

Re:Linux still playing catch up.

[I'm just joshin]

Except for a lack of TRIM support, and a few too many quriky bugs from the still rapidly changing code base.

FreeBSD

[Oswald McWeany]

FreeBSD sounds great! How much does it cost?

Re: FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Your dignity

Re: FreeBSD

[Oswald McWeany]

Your dignity

I have no dignity, it must be free!

Re:Has not changed

[jellomizer]

FreeBSD is focused on being a traditional Unix system. Unlike a lot of Linux distribution like Ubuntu who try to be desktop or workstation that they want to compete against OS X and Windows. FreeBSD mostly stays the Pure Unix system for others to work off of.

FreeBSD is the Chocolate Bar Operating Systems.
Where most of the new candy out there will be based on a Chocolate bar, they will have Nuts, Caramel, nugget.... That will try to make the candy more complex for peoples particular liking, the Standard Chocolate Bar is still around and when the fad candies go away, they will always go back to the Chocolate Bar and build the next fad off of that.

FreeBSD doesn't have too many changes that are noticeable, but they are often necessary to keep it current in today's time.

Re:Wasted 15+ years of my life on that garbage.

[toadlife]

Nobody misses you.

Love and use FreeBSD

[sremick]

FreeBSD has so many technical advantages over Linux. It's unfortunate that stupid things held it back in the day and caused Linux to be the one most-commonly adopted.

From the unified kernel and userland environment, to the fantastic ports system, to the documentation, to the ridiculous stability, to the performance, to ZFS, to the LACK OF SYSTEMD... I use it anytime I can. Unfortunately its lack of popularity hold back using it as a desktop (it can be done, but it's gotten to the point that so many things have become dependent on Linux-isms and Linux has gone so off the rails with things that it's too much effort for dev teams to make alternate proper unix versions that'd run on FreeBSD and such. So you have issues with drivers for peripherals, video cards. Popular desktop environments won't compile (the only Gnome that works is an old version). No Dropbox, etc. For years though I ran FreeBSD as my primary desktop on my home computer.

You used to see FreeBSD rule the top uptime lists, and tons of web hosting providers used it. But then when things like cPanel stopped making FreeBSD versions, that dwindled away. Now if you want FreeBSD on a webhost you're going to have to fully manage it from the ground up, and use something like Digital Ocean.

I still use FreeBSD at home in the form of FreeNAS and pfSense. And if I have cause to build a unix server for any reason which I'd be managing from a terminal, I absolutely choose FreeBSD.

Re:Love and use FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD tends to gracefully overload. Linux tends to crash and burn. Linux is perfectly fine as long as you don't overload it. FreeBSD's performance just levels off once it reaches maximum load. Linux has negative scaling where it becomes slower past max. It's the kind of thing system admins care about but devs don't.

Quite a few blogs from big companies that specialize in network or storage, like Netflix, where they thoroughly tried Linux. Tried every optimization, hired specialists, made their own custom tweaks, but Linux kept spontaneously blowing up under extreme loads. Think of a single server saturating a 100Gb interface while maintaining 10 million connections and creating 100,000 new connections per second. Linux' IO stacks cannot handle those loads without a major refactoring the stacks and the kernel as a whole. FreeBSD was engineered from the very beginning for these kinds of things. It's not perfect and has a lot of areas for great improvement, the structure is all there, purposefully architected and designed.

And due to licensing, FreeBSD gets a lot more research. At least in the USA, publicly funded research must be free for all and that does not play well with GPL. FreeBSD's licensing doesn't care. This same issue also applies to many internet standards, where the sample implementation must be license compatible with everyone. GPL does not play well with others.

Anyone know if Netcraft's confirmed it?

[rsilvergun]

*ducks*.

Re:Has not changed

[jellomizer]

A dark chocolate bar is Gluten Free, Vegan, and full of Carbs. Free Trade wouldn't effect its taste.