FreeBSD 13.1-RC6 Released Due To Lingering Bugs

FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE was supposed to be out by the end of April but lingering bugs have yielded extra release candidates for this latest BSD operating system update.

FreeBSD 13.1-RC5 was issued last week due to fixes needed to correct boot failures when using ZFS+GELI, pkg problems around symbolic links, correcting the ABI in libcxxrt, and other problems. That was expected to be the last release candidate.

Out today now is FreeBSD 13.1-RC6 as another extra release candidate. Addressed this week was a problem with the XHCI driver where it was not attaching devices in some circumstances. That notable issue has been fixed plus also updating to OpenSSL 1.1.1o.

Given effectively just one notable fix this week, perhaps FreeBSD 13.1-RC6 will hold and be the last RC and then FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE would be up next in about one week.

While not as major as FreeBSD 14 as the next big feature release, FreeBSD 13.1 enables Position Independent Executable (PIE) support by default on 64-bit architectures, a new "zfskeys" service script for the automatic decryption of ZFS datasets, NVMe emulation with Bhyve hypervisor, chroot now supports unprivileged operations, various POWER and RISC-V improvements, big endian support improvements, support for the HiFive Unmatched RISC-V development board, updating against OpenZFS file-system support upstream, and many other device driver improvements.

The FreeBSD 13.1 release notes are getting finished up at FreeBSD.org. Hopefully now we are just days away from seeing FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE.