FreeBSD 13.1-BETA Headlined By Changes To POWER & RISC-V Architectures

Out today is the first beta release of the upcoming FreeBSD 13.1 operating system update.

Released nearly one year ago was FreeBSD 13.0 while now FreeBSD 13.1 is working its way towards release as the next update to this open-source BSD operating system.

FreeBSD 13.1 is bringing a number of fixes and improvements, especially for those running FreeBSD on RISC-V and PowerPC hardware. Some of the changes as of FreeBSD 13.1 Beta 1 include:

- Support for the LLVM debugger (LLDB) on FreeBSD PowerPC architecture.

- Enabling optimized Assembly code for OpenSSL on PowerPC / PowerPC64 / PowerPC64LE.

- Support for building AddressSanitizer (ASAN) and UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer (UBSAN) on RISC-V 64-bit.

- Enabling building of OpenMP libraries on RISC-V 64-bit.

- A wide variety of other PowerPC 64-bit fixes.

- Big endian support for more FreeBSD kernel device drivers.

Downloads and more information on today's FreeBSD 13.1-BETA1 release via FreeBSD.org.

One or two more betas are expected this month for FreeBSD 13.1 followed by up to three release candidates. The plan at this stage is to have FreeBSD 13.1 formally ready for release around 26 April.