FreeBSD 14 Alpha 2 Available For Testing - The Last Series For 32-bit Platforms
The FreeBSD 14.0 Alpha 2 release is now available while next week the FreeBSD 14 stable code branching is expected to begin. The betas of FreeBSD 14.0 are expected to begin in early September and run through the month until FreeBSD 14 RC1 at the end of September. If all goes well after a few weekly release candidates, FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE should debut before the end of October.
FreeBSD 14 is bringing many hardware support improvements and a wide variety of kernel enhancements over the FreeBSD 13 series.
Notable is that FreeBSD 14 is the last series supporting 32-bit systems. FreeBSD 15.0 will drop support for 32-bit hardware platforms although FreeBSD 15 64-bit systems will retain support for running 32-bit binaries. That 32-bit binary compatibility is expected to be supported at least through FreeBSD 16.
FreeBSD 14 does add a new "fwget" utility for fetching firmware packages. The fwget utility initially can get firmware for Intel and AMD GPUs. Among the many changes to find are FreeBSD replacing sendmail with dma, Kinst as a new DTrace provider, makefs adding ZFS support, boottrace is a new interface for capturing trace events during system boot and shutdown processes, the kernel TLS offloading handling receive-side offloading of TLS 1.3, initial WiFi 6 support in WPA, sh is now the default shell for the root user, and an updated LLVM toolchain.
More details on the changes coming with FreeBSD 14 via the RELNOTES that are a work-in-progress.
FreeBSD 14 Alpha 2 downloads are available from download.freebsd.org.
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