FreeBSD 13.4 Nears Release With Modernized DVD Package Set, Driver Updates

FreeBSD 13.4-RC1 has been released ahead of its planned official release in early September. While the FreeBSD 14 series delivers the latest and greatest, FreeBSD 13.4 is a nice incremental update for those still depending upon a FreeBSD 13 base.

FreeBSD 13.4 has a number of minor updates coming to the operating system. There are several driver updates like to the Intel ICE Ethernet network drvier and IRDRMA drivers. The LLVM/Clang compiler has been updated to LLVM 18.1.5 and there are also a number of other package updates such as SQLite 3.46 and OpenSSH 9.7p1. The in-progress FreeBSD 13.4 release notes can be found on FreeBSD.org.

For today's FreeBSD 13.4-RC1 weekly development release, there is now a modernized set of packages on the DVD ISOs, a crash fix for "tail -F", fixes for per-user ZFS dataset handling within the adduser command, and other fixes.

Modernizing the packages on the FreeBSD 13.4 DVD images include adding seatd, the Sway compositor, and other packages while dropping the xf86-video-vmware driver and other old packages. This is applying the same package modernization work as was done for FreeBSD 14.1.

Look for FreeBSD 13.4-RELEASE to be out around 3 September.