While in recent months there have been some improvements to FreeBSD that have helped yield greater reliability in running AMD Ryzen processors on this BSD operating system, some users are still reporting hard to diagnose stability problems on FreeBSD.

It looks like the DragonFlyBSD 5.4 release will be delivering at least a few kernel-level performance improvements.

It's a busy month for the BSDs with DragonFlyBSD 5.2 having come along with OpenBSD 6.3 and right before that was TrueOS 18.03. Now there's finally the release candidate of the long-awaited NetBSD 8.0 update.

Besides the fresh BSD/Linux disk performance tests, some other tests I ran on various BSDs and Linux distributions this week was looking at the performance impact of Intel Meltdown CPU vulnerability mitigation on each of them, namely the performance impact of using kernel page-table isolation.

With the recent release of DragonFlyBSD 5.2 one of the prominent changes is HAMMER2 now being considered stable for most use-cases. I've been running some benchmarks of this file-system compared to alternatives on other operating systems and have some FreeBSD / Linux reference points to share.

Besides looking at the HAMMER2 performance in DragonFlyBSD 5.2, another prominent change with this new BSD operating system release is the Spectre and Meltdown mitigations being shipped. In this article are some tests looking at the performance cost of DragonFlyBSD 5.2 for mitigating the Meltdown Intel CPU vulnerability.

In addition to the overhauled/rewritten Windows support, the upcoming Phoronix Test Suite 8.0-Aremark is also featuring much better support for the BSDs. As part of that testing, here are some fresh benchmarks of FreeBSD and TrueOS.

DragonFlyBSD 5.2 is now available as the latest installment of this popular BSD operating system.

OpenBSD 6.3 hadn't been due until the middle of the month, but the official release of this popular BSD operating system is available today.

The crew working on the FreeBSD-derived TrueOS operating system formerly known as PC-BSD have put out a special release of their platform in order to ship the Spectre and Meltdown mitigations.

The first release candidate is now available of the upcoming DragonFlyBSD 5.2 operating system.

While FreeBSD has a Linux compatibility/emulation layer that allows it to run some Linux games, an independent community developer has been working on porting Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4 to FreeBSD.

The HAMMER2 file-system has been available with install-time support since DragonFlyBSD 5.0 while the latest Git code continues to revise this next-generation FS for DragonFly. Landing overnight in DragonFlyBSD were several HAMMER and HAMMER2 improvements.

While id Software founder John Carmack has been known for his open-source and Linux interests over the years and even working on Utah GLX back in the day, he just wrapped up a self-driven "programming retreat" where he was using OpenBSD.

The Qt5-written, BSD-focused Lumina Desktop Environment is receiving a big overhaul with its forthcoming 2.0 release.

A few days back FreeBSD 11 stable was mitigated for Meltdown (and Spectre vulnerabilities), which came more than one month after these nasty CPU vulnerabilities were disclosed while DragonFlyBSD was quickly mitigated and the first of the BSDs to do so. While OpenBSD is known for its security features and focus, only today did it land its initial Meltdown mitigation.

It's now possible to use the graphics/drm-next-kmod port on FreeBSD 11 stable.

Landing in FreeBSD today was the mitigation work for the Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities.

Just like the Linux developers, in the wake of the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities DragonFlyBSD developers have also been working on a variety of security improvements.

The NetBSD project has issued an update concerning recent security efforts for this popular BSD operating system.

After hitting the RC phase a few weeks ago, OPNsense 18.1 has been officially released as the latest version of this pfSense-forked network/router-oriented BSD operating system.

While Linux has been playing happily with Ryzen CPUs as long as you weren't affected by the performance marginality problem where you had to swap out for a newer CPU (and Threadripper and EPYC CPUs have been running splendid in all of my testing with not having any worries), it seems the BSDs (at least FreeBSD) are still having some quirks to address.

For fans of the pfSense-forked OPNsense FreeBSD-based firewall/network operating system, the first release candidate of OPNsense 18.1 is available for testing.

Last week DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon posted initial patches for addressing Meltdown on this popular BSD distribution. Dillon has now posted his initial patch for targeting the Spectre CPU vulnerability.

On Friday DragonFlyBSD's Matthew Dillon already landed his DragonFly kernel fixes for the Meltdown vulnerability affecting Intel CPUs. But what about the other BSDs?

Linux, macOS, and Windows has taken most of the operating system attention when it comes down to the recently-disclosed Meltdown vulnerability but the BSDs too are prone to this CPU issue. DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has landed his fixes for Meltdown.

DragonFlyBSD should now have initial support for Intel's latest-generation "Coffee Lake" graphics.

The first point release to NetBSD 7.1 is now available as this BSD operating system ends out 2017.

The FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report covering work done in the third quarter has now been published.

There's an active discussion this week about making Wayland support available by default on FreeBSD.