FreeBSD 14 Beta Released - Initial WiFi 6 Support, Updated LLVM Toolchain, Fwget Utility

FreeBSD 14 Beta 1 is available this weekend for helping to test out this major BSD operating system update that should debut as stable 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, at least through FreeBSD 16.

FreeBSD 14 adds a new "fwget" utility for fetching firmware packages - initially fwget 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. There are also many other changes as outlined in the release notes that remain a work-in-progress.

More details and downloads for FreeBSD 14 Beta 1 via the mailing list announcement. More betas followed by release candidates will arrive over the coming weeks while FreeBSD 14-STABLE should be out before the end of October.