FreeBSD 13.2-RC3 Released With OpenSSH 9.3, Major Performance Fix For Makefs

The third and potentially last release candidate of FreeBSD 13.2 is now available for testing ahead of the planned stable 13.2-RELEASE around the end of March.

FreeBSD 13.2 has been collecting many updates to this point release ahead of FreeBSD 14 as the next major feature release due out later this year. FreeBSD 13.2 re-introduces the WireGuard driver to its source tree for that popular open-source secure VPN tunnel, ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) is enabled for 64-bit executables by default, Bhyve hypervisor enhancements, improved Intel Alder Lake support, Kdump has support for decoding Linux system calls, and a range of other software updates and other improvements to its kernel.

With this weekend's FreeBSD 13.2-RC3 release there is now the recently released OpenSSH 9.3 included, a major performance fix to makefs when dealing with MS-DOS file-systems, and changes to the host/machine ID generation.

Netflix sponsored the work on makefs to make MSDOS file-system creation "go fast". The patch explained, "Add missing brelse(bp). Without it the cache grows and we have a n^2 lookup. I'm not entirely sure why we read the block before we write it back out, since the only side effect of that is to allocate memory, clear the memory, read it in from disk, throw it away with the contents of the file being written out. We likely should just do a getblk() here instead, but even with all that, this takes the time it takes to create a 150MB msdos fs image down from 5 minutes to 30 seconds."

Yes, a one line of code addition changed the makefs MS-DOS creation time drop from 5 minutes and 18 seconds down to a mere 31 seconds... Still with it taking a half-minute to create a 150MB file-system image seems like there is further room for improvement.

More details and downloads for FreeBSD 13.2-RC3 via the release announcement.