FreeBSD 12.3 Released With Updated AMD & Networking Hardware, Password Protected ZIPs

While FreeBSD 13 is the current stable version of this leading open-source BSD operating system, FreeBSD 12.3 shipped today for their N-1 series.

FreeBSD 13.0 officially released in April while for those that haven't yet migrated to the new series, FreeBSD 12.3 is the latest and greatest for the FreeBSD 12 series.

FreeBSD 12.3 has updates to various networking drivers, updates to various open-source packages it employs, updated application improvements, kernel bug fixes, and other fixes at large.

Some of the kernel device driver improvements worth mentioning include Zen 3 / Ryzen 4000 APU / Renoir / Van Gogh temperature monitoring in amdtemp, Zen 3 support for AMDSMN, support for Mikrotik 10G/25G network devices, support for the Intel Killer Wireless-AC 1550i, ASUS WL-167G V3 support, and Intel 100 Series / C230 Series AMT support.

Among the user-space changes worth mentioning in FreeBSD 12.3 are Bhyve fixing large IO handling in its NVMe emulation, freebsd-update has been updated with a new flag to support jails, fstyp can now detect exFAT file-systems, growfs can now operation on read-write mounted file-systems, unzip now supports password protected archives, and more.

Yes, FreeBSD 12.3 in 2021 brings password-protected ZIP file handling to its unzip utility... (Granted, p7zip and alternatives have been in FreeBSD Ports as an alternative means of previously dealing with password-protected ZIPs on FreeBSD.)

FreeBSD 12.3 also pulls in bc 5.0, OpenSSL 1.1.1i, SQLite 3.35.5, Subversion 1.14.1 LTS, and others. FreeBSD 12.3's boot loader adds support for booting from a memory disk, support for booting from ZFS pools without features, and supporting additional ZFS features.

Downloads and more information on FreeBSD 12.3 changes via FreeBSD.org.