FreeBSD Reduces OS Support From 5 To 4 Years, Continues Collaboration With AMD
The FreeBSD developers remain very busy and some of their Q3-2024 accomplishments include:
- The FreeBSD release team has decided to reduce the support timeline from five to four years. After the four year period of FreeBSD release support, there will be a "best effort" support attempt.
- AMD's collaboration with the FreeBSD Foundation continues. One of the ongoing joint AMD + FreeBSD projects is to develop an AMD IOMMU driver for the platform. This AMD IOMMU driver is nearing completion and testing is ongoing with AMD large-core-count servers.
- As part of the collaboration between the FreeBSD Foundation and Quantum Leap Research for improving FreeBSD laptop support, the Intel and AMD graphics drivers are seeing updates. There is also ongoing work for better WiFi support, enhancing power management, audio improvements, and other laptop hardware feature work.
- FreeBSD 14.2 release preparations are underway with FreeBSD 14.2 Beta 1 recently debuting. They hope to issue FreeBSD 14.2-RELEASE around early December.
- The FreeBSD audio mixer has implemented hot-swapping, there is now a sound dummy driver, and other sound support work.
- Changes are being made to dhclient to speed-up the FreeBSD boot process. Google sponsored this work via GSOC to "boot significantly faster" for the OS -- about two seconds.
- A project started to bring FreeBSD to the PinePhone Pro.
- AArch64 SIMD enhancements are being made for better performance on ARM.
The report in full can be read over on FreeBSD.org.
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