After a series of alpha releases, FreeBSD 12.0 Beta 1 was issued today to help encourage testing ahead of this operating system update due out in early December.

Adding to the exciting release day is Theo de Raadt releasing OpenBSD 6.4 as the newest version of this BSD operating system known for its security mindfulness.

DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has been quite impressed with AMD's Threadripper 2 processors particularly the Threadripper 2990WX with 32-cores / 64-threads. Dillon has made various optimizations to DragonFly for helping out this processor in past months and overnight he made another significant improvement.

Especially with TrueOS once again taking a new direction, one of the few current BSDs focused on a great desktop experience is MidnightBSD that is about to mark its 1.0 release.

FreeBSD is looking to deprecate "most" of their 10/100 Ethernet drivers in FreeBSD 12 so that they can be dropped entirely in FreeBSD 13, but not everyone wants to see these older networking drivers dismissed.

With the last of the major GCC 8 build issues of the DragonFlyBSD code-base resolved, this BSD operating system has switched to using this latest stable release of the GNU Compiler Collection by default.

While NetBSD 8.0 was released in July with new features like initial USB 3.0 support and UEFI boot-loader support for x86 64-bit hardware, for those not wanting to jump to 8.0 from the 7 series can now enjoy NetBSD 7.2.

Last week I posted some initial tests and benchmarks of DragonFlyBSD/FreeBSD on the AMD Threadripper 2990WX. While that went well and the BSDs scale with this 32-core / 64-thread processor better than Windows, lead DragonFly developer Matthew Dillon had picked up a 2990WX system and has been tuning the kernel ever since. Here are some benchmarks looking at some of his recent optimizations.

With KDE4 not having seen an upstream release in years and the old KDE4 code beginning to break under newer C++ compilers, the KDE-FreeBSD team has announced a four-month deprecation period after which they are dropping the KDE4 ports from the operating system.

DRM is causing a lot of vibrant discussions this week on the FreeBSD mailing list... And no, it's not even Digital Rights Management but rather colorful commentary about their Direct Rendering Manager code and plans for FreeBSD 12.

While it was just days ago that DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon got his hands on a Threadripper 2990WX 32-core / 64-thread "beast", got it working under this long ago forked operating system from FreeBSD, and proceeded to exclaim with joy how powerful this system is, he's now made it even better. Dillon has landed some additional kernel work to benefit the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX.

Last week I carried out some tests of BSD vs. Linux on the new 32-core / 64-thread Threadripper 2990WX. I tested FreeBSD 11, FreeBSD 12, and TrueOS -- those benchmarks will be published in the next few days. I tried DragonFlyBSD, but at the time it wouldn't boot with this AMD HEDT processor. But now the latest DragonFlyBSD development kernel can handle the 2990WX and the lead DragonFly developer calls this new processor "a real beast" and is stunned by its performance potential.

The first alpha release of FreeBSD 12.0 was quietly uploaded a few days ago to the project's download servers as the first step to shipping this next major update to the FreeBSD operating system.

While OpenWRT 18.06 was released today as the popular Linux-based networking/embedded distribution, for those preferring FreeBSD, the OPNsense 18.7 release is also shipping today.

For those relying upon BSD in security-critical environments, a new HardenedBSD 11-STABLE update is now available for this security-enhanced fork of FreeBSD.

While it's been on mirrors for a few days, NetBSD 8.0 was officially released this weekend.

The long overdue NetBSD 8.0 operating system update appears ready now to ship.

DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has provided an update on the open-source operating system project's infrastructure and acknowledging the SSD upgrades that are noticeably beneficial over HDDs.

Granted OpenBSD isn't the most desktop focused BSD out there and that WiFi isn't therefore the highest priority for this security-focused operating system, but with the latest code it can now finally auto-join WiFi networks.

The folks at iX Systems have announced their first public beta of FreeNAS 11.2, their downstream of FreeBSD 11.2 focused on supporting network-attached storage (NAS) systems.

The second release candidate of the upcoming NetBSD 8.0 is now available.

Being squared away for the NetBSD 8.1 release are audio improvements within the kernel.

FreeBSD 11.2 is ready to set sail as the first significant FreeBSD update since last July's 11.1 release.

While the Linux support for AMD Ryzen/EPYC processors has been solid on Linux now largely the past number of months with just some exceptions like Raven Ridge display issues, the FreeBSD support has been a bit more choppy.

DragonFlyBSD 5.2.2 is now available as the latest stable release to this popular BSD operating system.

The newest weekly release candidate of the upcoming FreeBSD 11.2 is now available for testing.

Two weeks back we shared the news that one of Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver veterans decided to change roles and is now focused on improving FreeBSD for Intel hardware. Ben Widawsky is working on FreeBSD improvements that can at least relate to Intel and it turns out the company has a new team of developers on the task.

For FreeBSD 12.0-CURRENT in development there is now kernel support for pNFS while the user-space components are landing soon for this Parallel NFS support.

While the DragonFlyBSD kernel has already landed its mitigation for Spectre V1/V2 and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities, a fresh round of CPU bug hardening work was just merged into their kernel.

The second release candidate of FreeBSD 11.2 is now available for testing.