FreeBSD 14 Nears Release With Support For Up To 1024 CPU Cores, Updated Drivers
FreeBSD 14 is the last series supporting 32-bit systems. FreeBSD 15 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 also adds a new "fwget" utility for fetching firmware packages. The fwget utility initially can get firmware for Intel and AMD GPUs.
Among the many other changes to find in FreeBSD 14 are 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.
FreeBSD 14 on ARM64 and AMD64 now supports up to 1024 CPU cores, up from the current limit of 256 cores. With AMD EPYC Bergamo now allowing 128-cores / 256-threads per socket, that current FreeBSD limit is exceeded so now at least FreeBSD 14.0 will allow for playing with these high core count servers. FreeBSD 14 should also reboot faster, ISA sound card support was removed, and there is a new Intel QAT driver with more features and support than the prior FreeBSD QAT driver for QuickAssist Technology. Netflix also sponsored the removal of many other old drivers from FreeBSD.
The work-in-progress release notes lay out other interesting details with the forthcoming FreeBSD 14. Friday's FreeBSD 14.0-RC1 release announcement outlines updates to the Linux KPI, various WiFi updates, and a race condition fix as among the changes this week for the release candidate. At least two more release candidates are expected before FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE is made around 7 November.
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