Software Update: FreeBSD 13.0

Members of the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team have released version 13.0 of FreeBSD. FreeBSD was created in 1993 and is developed as a whole, unlike, say, Linux, whose kernel is maintained by one group of developers and certain applications by others. Because of this, FreeBSD is generally considered more stable and robust than several other operating systems. Extensive release notes can be found on this page are found, these are briefly the most important changes:

FreeBSD 13.0 RELEASE Announcement

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE. This is the first release of the stable/13 branch.

Some of the highlights:

• The clang, lld, and lldb utilities and compiler-rt, llvm, libunwind, and libc++ libraries have been updated to version 11.0.1.
• Removed the obsolete version of the GNU debugger that was installed to /usr/libexec for use by crashinfo(8). Detailed kernel crash information can be obtained by installing modern GDB from ports or packages.
• Removed the obsolete binutils 2.17 and gcc(1) 4.2.1 from the tree. All supported architectures now use the LLVM/clang toolchain.
• The BSD version of grep(1) is now installed by default. The obsolete GNU version that was the previous default has been removed.
• Removed CU-SeeMe support from libalias(3).
• The qat(4) driver has been added, supporting some of the cryptographic acceleration functions of the Intel QuickAssist (QAT) device. The qat(4) driver supports the QAT devices integrated with Atom C2000 and C3000 and Xeon C620 and D-1500 platforms, and the Intel QAT Adapter 8950.
• Several deprecated drivers have been removed.
• Several drivers have been ported to the PowerPC64 architecture.
• The kernel now supports in-kernel framing and encryption of Transport Layer Security (TLS) data on TCP sockets for TLS versions 1.0 through 1.3. Transmit offload via in-kernel crypto drivers is supported for MtE cipher suites using AES-CBC as well as AEAD cipher suites using AES-GCM. Receive offload via in-kernel crypto drivers is supported for AES-GCM cipher suites for TLS 1.2. Using KTLS requires the use of a KTLS-aware userland SSL library. The OpenSSL library included in the base system does not enable KTLS support by default, but support can be enabled by building with the WITH_OPENSSL_KTLS option
• The 64-bit ARM architecture known as arm64 or AArch64 is promoted to Tier-1 status for FreeBSD 13.
• And much more…​

For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list, available at:

• https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/13.0R/relnotes/
• https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/13.0R/errata/

For more information about FreeBSD release engineering activities, please see:

• https://www.FreeBSD.org/releng/