FreeBSD Working On Support For LinuxBoot, Going From 256 To 1024 CPU Core Limit
Among the many changes made in the FreeBSD world over the past quarter, some of the most interesting highlights include:
- FreeBSD support for LinuxBoot has been worked on for this boot firmware that makes use of the Linux kernel. FreeBSD/AArch64 can now boot from Linux in a Linux boot environment and the FreeBSD/AMD64 port is around 80% done for being able to boot via LinuxBoot.
- Due to CPUs like AMD EPYC Bergamo and Genoa coming to market with more than 256 threads in a dual socket configuration, FreeBSD is looking to increase its MAXCPU count from the current 256 threshold. FreeBSD developers for FreeBSD are looking to raise the max CPU count to 1024 for FreeBSD 14. FreeBSD still needs more work though to deal with scalability bottlenecks for these very high core count servers.
With AMD EPYC 9754 processors it's possible to build a two socket server with 256 cores / 512 threads, exceeding current FreeBSD limits.
- FreeBSD is pursuing work to offer SIMD-enhanced versions of common libc functions. For common C library functions they hope to have scalar / x86-64-v2 / x86-64-v3 / x86-64-v4 optimized versions.
- FreeBSD's Linux compatibility layer for binaries has been improved and now supports preserving FPU XSAVE state across signal delivery on AMD64. In turn modern Golang is working via this compatibility layer and there were various bugs resolved and other enhancements over the past quarter.
- Ongoing boot performance improvements for FreeBSD. With the Firecracker virtual machine manager, FreeBSD with some experimental patches can boot a FreeBSD kernel in under 20 ms.
- Work on bringing OpenSSL 3 into the FreeBSD base.
- FreeBSD celebrated its 30th birthday.
- The FreeBSD Core Team now manages the Code of Conduct Committee.
See the Q2-2023 FreeBSD status report on FreeBSD.org.
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