FreeBSD 12.1 Is Near With Libomp Finally In Base, LLD Linker By Default For i386

FreeBSD 12.1 is near with the first release candidate shipping this weekend. While a point release over the nearly one year old FreeBSD 12.0, it does come with some notable changes in tow.

The Friday night release of FreeBSD 12.1-RC1. brings with it various driver updates, SCTP/TCP fixes, a null pointer dereference fix for a possible system crash, and other fixes.

More broadly though, FreeBSD 12.1 is finally shipping the libomp OpenMP library by default in its base set (finally out-of-the-box OpenMP with Clang on FreeBSD!), the LLD linker is now used by default for i386, updated OpenSSL and other utilities, BearSSL has been added to the base system, using GCC now disables "-Werror" by default, Gzip updated with the "-l" option for XZ files, and other mostly smaller updates. The tentative changes for FreeBSD 12.1 can be found via their draft release notes.

Looking ahead, there will be one or two more release candidates over the following weeks and if all goes well FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE will debut the first week of November. Following that, fresh FreeBSD 12.1 benchmarks will be coming on Phoronix.