FreeBSD Had A Very Busy Q1-2019 As It Approaches Its 26th Birthday

FreeBSD had a very busy first quarter with a status report out today providing a look at to all of the ongoing development activities for this leading BSD platform.

Some of the highlights for FreeBSD in Q1-2019 included:

- The FreeBSD Foundation supported work for FUSE file-system kernel support, Linuxulator testing/diagnostic improvements, SDIO and WiFi improvements, x86-64 scalability/performance improvements, and OpenZFS RAID-Z expansion.

- FreeBSD Foundation developers also worked on various i386/AMD64 improvements, improving RISC-V architecture support, vulnerability mitigations, improved Syzkaller support, network stack improvements, DTrace fixes, and more.

- The FreeBSD Ports collection surpassed 32,500 ports.

- FreeBSD support for Broadcom 64-bit ARM SoCs, namely the BCM5871X series, is being worked on.

- Various improvements to the C run-time.

- Continued work on FreeBSD boot security improvements around TPM 2.0 and UEFI Secure Boot.

- Work has started to replace the 20 year old Zlib implementation within the FreeBSD kernel to a modern version.

- Expanding the usage of LLVM LLD as the default FreeBSD system linker to more architectures and other improvements.

- For KPTI support as Kernel Page Table Isolation for Meltdown mitigations there is now support for per-process controls and the ability to disable KPTI for children of a processor.

Meanwhile later in June marks the 26th anniversary of FreeBSD's launch with National FreeBSD Day.

The quarterly status report can be read in full here.