FreeBSD Adding More AMD64 SIMD, Continues Improving Linux Compatibility Layer

FreeBSD developers have been busy preparing for the release of FreeBSD 14 as well as making a variety of enhancements to this leading BSD operating system.

FreeBSD a few days ago published their Q3'2023 status report to highlight all the interesting development initiatives they've pursued over the past quarter. Some of the FreeBSD Q3 highlights include:

- The FreeBSD Foundation was helped along by significant donations from NetApp, Netflix, and ARM. So far their fundraising total for the year is $375,000 USD out of their $2.23M budget.

- The max CPU count on FreeBSD was bumped up to 1024 CPUs for AMD64 and ARM64 architectures.

- FreeBSD developers have been working to fill gaps within the FreeBSD desktop experience. This includes installation improvements and various new ports to enhance the desktop usability.

- Better support for OpenSSL 3 on the FreeBSD base system.

- The SquashFS driver for the FreeBSD kernel has been finished.

- FreeBSD's Linux compatibility layer for running Linux binaries has added support for additional system calls. It's now possible to use Linux rsync and debootstrap Ubuntu 23.04 on FreeBSD.

- FreeBSD has been making more SIMD enhancements for AMD64 with more AVX2, AVX-512 and more via x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels for various functions.

- The process to update the GCC default version to GCC 13 on FreeBSD has started.

The quarterly status report in full can be found via FreeBSD.org.