FreeBSD Can Now Be Built From Linux/macOS Hosts, Transition To Git Continues

The FreeBSD project has published their Q3-2020 report on the state of this leading BSD operating system.

Among the highlights they made during the third quarter include:

- The FreeBSD Foundation issued additional grants around WiFi and Linux KPI layer improvements, Linux application compatibility improvements with the Linuxulator, DRM/graphics driver updates, Zstd compression for OpenZFS, online RAID-Z expansion, and modernizing the LLDB target support for FreeBSD.

- FreeBSD Foundation staff members have been working to improve the build infrastructure, ARM64 support, migrating their development tree to Git, rewriting the UNIX domain socket locking, and run-time dynamic linker and kernel ELF loader improvements.

- On the Git front, their transitioning from Subversion to Git they hope to have a beta repository by the end of October.

- The release engineering team has been working to finish up FreeBSD 12.2 and ship that soon.

- The upcoming FreeBSD 12.2 will have improvements to the Linux compatibility layer.

- The FreeBSD Ports collection surpassed 40,000 ports/packages.

- Various improvements to their Mesa and other graphics packaging.

- As of September it's now possible to build a functioning buildworld and buildkernel environment from macOS and Linux hosts. This is done due to some CI tools only supporting Linux/macOS and wanting to use them for constructing the FreeBSD base system and was sponsored by DARPA.

- FreeBSD 13-CURRENT is up to the state of the Linux 5.4.62 kernel DRM drivers.

- Continued work on the URE driver for USB 3.0 Gigabit Ethernet driver coverage. There have also been wireless improvements to the ath10k, Intel, and rtw88 drivers.

The lengthy list of all the FreeBSD initiatives and software improvements in full during the past quarter is laid out via the status report.