BSD News Archives


808 BSD open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.

DragonFlyBSD's HAMMER2 File-System Seeing New Improvements, Initial Recovery Support
DragonFlyBSD's HAMMER2 File-System Seeing New Improvements, Initial Recovery Support

When it comes to the BSD operating systems, DragonFlyBSD's HAMMER2 is one of the most interesting innovations. HAMMER2 supports online deduplication, clustering, multiple mountable file-system roots, snapshots, compression, encryption, extensive checksumming, and other features. Over the past decade it's evolved quite nicely and in recent days has seen further enhancements.

4 October 2023 - Better HAMMER2 - 11 Comments
FreeBSD 13.2-RC6 Released Due To Lingering Issue
FreeBSD 13.2-RC6 Released Due To Lingering Issue

FreeBSD 13.2-RC4 was scheduled to be the last release candidate for this BSD operating system update but then 13.2-RC5 came with one fix. Now in dragging out the release into April, FreeBSD 13.2-RC6 has been released with another fix.

2 April 2023 - FreeBSD 13.2-RC6 - 2 Comments
FreeBSD 13.2-RC5 Released With One Last Fix
FreeBSD 13.2-RC5 Released With One Last Fix

FreeBSD 13.2-RC4 was released this weekend while it's already been replaced by FreeBSD 13.2-RC5 to land one more fix prior to making the final release preparations on this next stable update to this BSD operating system.

27 March 2023 - FreeBSD 13.2-RC5 - Add A Comment
OpenBSD Finally Adds Guided Disk Encryption To Its Installer
OpenBSD Finally Adds Guided Disk Encryption To Its Installer

Full disk encryption is quite important in today's computing environment while some operating systems still sadly don't provide an easy and streamlined manner of setting up an encrypted disk at install-time. Thankfully with the next release of OpenBSD, they are introducing a guided disk encryption option to their installer.

10 March 2023 - OpenBSD + Easy Disk Encryption - 18 Comments
NVIDIA Lands X.Org Server Support For PRIME Render Offload On FreeBSD
NVIDIA Lands X.Org Server Support For PRIME Render Offload On FreeBSD

It's not too often I get to talk about major FreeBSD graphics driver improvements, but with the latest X.Org Server Git code paired with the recent NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver there is now support for PRIME render offload should you be using a multi-GPU setup on this BSD.

24 February 2023 - PRIME Render Offload For FreeBSD - 18 Comments
A Call For More Collaboration & Harmony Among BSD Hardware Drivers
A Call For More Collaboration & Harmony Among BSD Hardware Drivers

The BSD operating system projects tend to not receive as much support from hardware vendors as Linux and their driver support is made even more fragmented on the BSD side due to many subtle as well as not so subtle differences between the major BSDs. NetBSD developer Pierre Pronchery has proposed more "harmony" among BSD drivers with increased collaboration between the major BSD players on driver development.

9 February 2023 - BSD Driver Collaboration - 18 Comments
MidnightBSD 3.0 Coming Soon For FreeBSD-Derived Desktop OS
MidnightBSD 3.0 Coming Soon For FreeBSD-Derived Desktop OS

For those that may have tried the recent macOS-inspired helloSystem 0.8 release for that desktop-focused FreeBSD-based operating system, if that didn't satisfy your desktop BSD desires, MidnightBSD 3.0 is working its way to release as another alternative.

5 February 2023 - MidnightBSD 3.0 - 7 Comments
helloSystem 0.8 Released As macOS Inspired FreeBSD Desktop OS
helloSystem 0.8 Released As macOS Inspired FreeBSD Desktop OS

Following the demise of PC-BSD/TrueOS, the most compelling BSD-based desktop operating system with a pleasant out-of-the-box user experience is helloSystem. The helloSystem OS has been aiming to be the macOS of the BSDs and for the past few years has been building a macOS-inspired desktop atop FreeBSD. Out today is helloSystem 0.8 as their newest version built atop FreeBSD 13.1.

21 January 2023 - helloSystem 0.8 - 27 Comments
DragonFlyBSD's HAMMER2 File-System Being Ported To NetBSD
DragonFlyBSD's HAMMER2 File-System Being Ported To NetBSD

NetBSD continues using the FFS file-system by default while it's offered ZFS support that has been slowly improving -- in NetBSD-CURRENT is the ability to use ZFS as the root file-system if first booting to FFS, for example. There may be another modern file-system option soon with an effort underway to port DragonFlyBSD's HAMMER2 over to NetBSD.

11 January 2023 - NetBSD + HAMMER2? - 24 Comments
Trying Out The BSDs On The Intel Core i9 13900K "Raptor Lake"
Trying Out The BSDs On The Intel Core i9 13900K "Raptor Lake"

It's been a while since trying out the BSD operating systems on bleeding-edge hardware while a Phoronix Premium recently asked about the BSDs on Raptor Lake. Well, here are my initial experiences trying to run FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonflyBSD on the Intel Core i9 13900K desktop.

1 December 2022 - One Boots, The Others Fail - 41 Comments
FreeBSD Re-Introduces WireGuard Support Into Its Kernel
FreeBSD Re-Introduces WireGuard Support Into Its Kernel

Back in late 2020 FreeBSD initially landed WireGuard support ahead of FreeBSD 13. But then during the FreeBSD 13 release candidate phase, the WireGuard driver was removed over concerns over the quality of the initial implementation.

29 October 2022 - FreeBSD + WireGuard - Add A Comment
FreeBSD 14.0 Planned For Release Next July
FreeBSD 14.0 Planned For Release Next July

The FreeBSD release engineering team has published their initial release plans for FreeBSD 14.0 as well as follow-on FreeBSD 13.2 and 12.4 releases for the current stable series of this BSD operating system.

25 August 2022 - FreeBSD 14.0 Release Schedule - 7 Comments
3mdeb Eyes Fwupd Support For DragonFlyBSD To Handle UEFI Firmware Updates
3mdeb Eyes Fwupd Support For DragonFlyBSD To Handle UEFI Firmware Updates

Open-source firmware consulting firm 3mdeb last year worked on Fwupd support for FreeBSD so system firmware updates can be more easily handled on that popular BSD operating system and leveraging the Fwupd/LVFS infrastructure that's been happening for years in the Linux space. Their most recent target is now DragonFlyBSD for handling of UEFI firmware updates with Fwupd.

24 August 2022 - Fwupd On DragonFlyBSD - Add A Comment
DragonFlyBSD 6.2.2 Released With Fixes For HAMMER2, Kernel Bugs

DragonFlyBSD 6.2 was introduced back in January with the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver port, HAMMER2 improvements, and the NVMM hypervisor port, among other improvements. Out this weekend is DragonFlyBSD 6.2.2 with various bug-fixes atop that stable code-base.

11 June 2022 - DragonFlyBSD 6.2.2 - 5 Comments

808 BSD news articles published on Phoronix.