FreeBSD 13.1 Released With UEFI Boot Enhancements, Driver Improvements

After taking a few extra weeks to bake, FreeBSD 13.1 is out today as the newest stable release of this leading BSD operating system.

FreeBSD 13.1 is headlined by UEFI boot improvements for AMD64 and in particular can get a lot more systems now behaving properly for moving past legacy BIOS booting. FreeBSD 13.1 also adds support for freebsd-update to allow creating automated snapshots of the boot environment to try to make operating system updates foolproof. There is also a wide variety of hardware driver improvements in FreeBSD 13.1 with special attention to the Intel WiFi driver being in much better shape than prior releases.

Some of the other changes with FreeBSD 13.1 include enabling 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 changes throughout this BSD open-source ecosystem.

Downloads and the full change-log for FreeBSD 13.1 via FreeBSD.org.