FreeBSD Is Off To A Good 2021 Start With FreeBSD 13.0, PIE By Default, helloSystem

The FreeBSD project published their Q1 status report yesterday that outlines the progress they made over the past quarter on advancing this leading open-source BSD operating system.

Some of the FreeBSD highlights for Q1'2021 included:

- FreeBSD managed to successfully release the very exciting FreeBSD 13.0.

- The Linux compatibility layer "Linuxulator" continues seeing improvements, including various fixes this past quarter that helped Steam games as well as Mono and other software.

- FreeBSD binaries in base are finally built with position-independent executable (PIE) by default for 64-bit architectures. Moving forward, they are also trying to enable address space layout randomization (ASLR) by default too for 64-bit architectures.

- The helloSystem project for a macOS-inspired, desktop-friendly FreeBSD operating system has been making more progress and working towards its v0.5 release.

- In better security, FreeBSD added support for enforcing a write XOR execute mapping policy.

- Continued work on continuous integration (CI) testing for FreeBSD.

- Better LLDB debugger support for FreeBSD, which should make it upstream into LLVM 13.0 / LLDB 13.0.

- Continued work on better ARM 64-bit support, particularly around Marvell SoCs.

More details on the FreeBSD achievements for the past quarter can be seen via the report at FreeBSD.org.