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

Written by Michael Larabel in BSD on 7 May 2021 at 09:11 AM EDT. 4 Comments
BSD
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.
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