FreeBSD 14.2 Released With OpenZFS Upgrade, Installer Improvements

[phoronix]

Phoronix: FreeBSD 14.2 Released With OpenZFS Upgrade, Installer Improvements

FreeBSD 14.2-RELEASE is out today as a strong, incremental update to the FreeBSD 14 series...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-14.2-Released

[Espionage724]

Whoop whoop! 🎉 It's been years since I've been excited over an OS release, and I made a hype video even

I've been using 14.2-RELEASE on my laptop and server for a few days now.

[kylew77]

Whoop whoop! 🎉 It's been years since I've been excited over an OS release, and I made a hype video even

I've been using 14.2-RELEASE on my laptop and server for a few days now.

Sweet video, love the windows 9x look and featuring OSRS in it! FreeBSD releases don't excite me like OpenBSD releases but just in general, any BSD release feels like there is so much more new features and quality of life with each update. I can't remember when the last time I got excited for an Ubuntu release, every LTS since 16.04 has been more or less the same on the Xubuntu side of things. Systemd, gnu userland with glbibc, and a Linux kernel that is newer.

[rabcor]

Wondering how up to date freebsd is on hardware support compared to linux today, just in general. GPU, Audio, Wifi, the usual suspects.

If I go and buy a new pc, odds are quite high it'll just work™ on linux, done that a couple times, admittedly had microphone issues both times but that was more or less the extent of my woes.

Is it the same for freebsd? or will i have no sound, no image and no internet? or is it gonna maybe work if i buy something that has all the devices from all the right vendors?

[Espionage724]

Wondering how up to date freebsd is on hardware support compared to linux today, just in general. GPU, Audio, Wifi, the usual suspects.

If I go and buy a new pc, odds are quite high it'll just work™ on linux, done that a couple times, admittedly had microphone issues both times but that was more or less the extent of my woes.

Is it the same for freebsd? or will i have no sound, no image and no internet? or is it gonna maybe work if i buy something that has all the devices from all the right vendors?

GPU: May depend on how well the hardware works with Linux kernel 6.1 (FreeBSD uses Linux GPU drivers). I have Mesa 24.1.7 on 14.2-R now so it seems the graphics stack itself is up-to-date! vkcube on Intel UHD 630 works, and I have video acceleration on Firefox/VA-API.

Audio: I'm not sure about Intel SoF or specialized cards, but general Realtek/Intel HDA stuff seems fine. There was something in 14.2-R's release about mixer hot-swapping that sounds interesting. Quality for me seems the same on FreeBSD like Linux and Windows but I use Stereo 2.1 speakers with basic 3.5mm onboard audio and probably can't tell a difference realistically

Wifi: Afaik FreeBSD doesn't support wireless AC speeds (nor AX), but can connect to 5GHz networks at a slower speed. You can use Linux network drivers in a small VM (called wifibox) for faster wifi on FreeBSD! I'm not really satisfied with either solution and just run a long Ethernet cable in-house, and USB tethering to my phone connected to wifi is faster than FreeBSD's native drivers currently and is convenient (wifibox 14.1-R on Intel 9560 was 40MB/s, native 2MB/s, Android USB 15 MB/s, and Ethernet to a router with mt76 OpenWRT was 40MB/s (laptop -> ethernet -> OWRT router -> ~AC WIFI~ -> AX main router); Linux and Windows were native 80 MB/s) (I didn't experiment with wifibox settings to know if it can be better)

Intel 8th-gen is the newest hardware I've tried FreeBSD on, with a Phenom II X4 being the oldest. I'm not too sure how the newest hardware works in-general on Linux, but I'm curious about NVIDIA driver support on FreeBSD (pretty confident there's some kind of official support but I haven't heard anyone really talk about it yet)

[rogerx]

GPU: May depend on how well the hardware works with Linux kernel 6.1 (FreeBSD uses Linux GPU drivers). I have Mesa 24.1.7 on 14.2-R now so it seems the graphics stack itself is up-to-date! vkcube on Intel UHD 630 works, and I have video acceleration on Firefox/VA-API.

Yup. Love to kick the tires with FreeBSD, however requires Linux kernel 6.2 for Intel Arc GPUs.

[Espionage724]

Yup. Love to kick the tires with FreeBSD, however requires Linux kernel 6.2 for Intel Arc GPUs.

I could be wrong about the support, but I was going on drm-61-kmod likely being tied to 6.1.

There's a recent post about someone trying Arc: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/c...install.95927/

But I suspect they might be running into the i915kms issue I ran into with drm-61-kmod (worked 14.1-R but not 14.2-R): https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/b...4/#post-681452

But I'm not too sure on what's entirely covered in drm-kmod, so while drm-515-kmod worked for me on UHD 630, I'm thinking that's too-old to support Arc if it's based on Linux 5.1*. But maybe it's not strictly-tied to a Linux kernel version and might have kmods for Arc also included?

Basically I'm not entirely sure how FreeBSD's support is for Intel Arc, but I'll be on the lookout for any reports about it!

Edit: https://www.freshports.org/graphics/...re-intel-kmod/ mentions dg2 which has me thinking there's some support!

[ReaperX7]

I've have FreeBSD 14.2 running fine on a Ryzen 7 3700X with a Radeon RX 5700XT just fine. Getting X to initialize was a bit of a chore having to manually setup amdgpu in a xorg.conf file, but it works using Xfce.

I can also now mount and manage my ArchZFS OpenZFS 2.2.6 volumes without a problem also.

[dragon321]

Wondering how up to date freebsd is on hardware support compared to linux today, just in general. GPU, Audio, Wifi, the usual suspects.

If I go and buy a new pc, odds are quite high it'll just work™ on linux, done that a couple times, admittedly had microphone issues both times but that was more or less the extent of my woes.

Is it the same for freebsd? or will i have no sound, no image and no internet? or is it gonna maybe work if i buy something that has all the devices from all the right vendors?

GPU works (NVIDIA supports FreeBSD natively, for AMD and Intel there are ported drivers from Linux), no idea about audio as I haven’t used FreeBSD on real machine (only VM recently) in a long time. As for the WiFi maybe it’s better now but on every laptop I had in past few years I couldn’t make WiFi work.

I try FreeBSD on desktop from time to time and the effect is always the same - few days of trying and back to Linux. The general experience of using FreeBSD on desktop for me can be summarized as “Linux but worse”. Everything that I can do on FreeBSD works the same or even better sometimes on Linux but few things that I’m using on Linux doesn’t work on FreeBSD or the experience is inferior. For example desktop - as far I know there is still no official support for KDE Plasma 6. It’s available in ports and might work but generally if you want desktop to work not “might work” then you should install Plasma 5. Same goes for Steam, it might work with Linux compatibility but the experience will be general inferior to running Steam on Linux.

Can’t say nothing wrong about server usage. I host some things on VM running FreeBSD and it just works.

[skeevy420]

Yup. Love to kick the tires with FreeBSD, however requires Linux kernel 6.2 for Intel Arc GPUs.

That's always been the factor between me using and not using FreeBSD. Dammit if Linux didn't have to start becoming a Gaming OS when FreeBSD started integrating the hell out of OpenZFS.

This sums it up: