FreeBSD 13.0-RC5 Released Due To Lingering Bugs

FreeBSD 13.0 was supposed to be out by the end of March but a bumpy past few weeks has led to extra release candidates. Out this weekend is FreeBSD 13.0-RC5 for what might now be the final test release.

FreeBSD 13.0-RC4 came out last weekend and was expected to be the last but some pressing bugs led to lengthening the release cycle once more with today's RC5 debut.

FreeBSD 13.0-RC5 fixes a pressing issue that could potentially affect some services from properly restarting like Nginx. That service restart issue is now fixed along with some networking fixes, some DTrace updates squeezed in, and COMPAT_FREEBSD32 fill/set dbregs/fpregs support for AArch64.

Hopefully this is the last release candidate and FreeBSD 13.0 will be cleared for landing next week.

Those wanting to test out the FreeBSD 13.0-RC5 build can find the images via the release announcement.

Overall with this big BSD operating system update there is an freebsd-update utility, a new Linux-compatible copy_file_range system call for efficient file copies, a much improved cryptographic framework within the kernel, AES-NI and armv8crypto are now included by default for the generic kernel builds to improve crypto performance, several new network drivers, efibootmgr EFI boot loader improvements, continued work on better supporting ARM/ARM64 hardware, the default CPU support for the i386 architecture is now i686 rather than i486, and plenty of other hardware improvements especially for newer components. Intel users should also be able to find much better performance on recent hardware generations.