9 ms·

FreeBSD 13.1

134 points by SpaceInvader 4y ago

ashton314 4y ago
The very first computer I used was a FreeBSD machine sitting in a small dark closet of my parents' house. Now that I'm all grown up, I run it on a Raspberry Pi and it makes me very very happy. Such a joy to setup—so simple, so stable. Really happy to see that it keeps getting some love. :)
efortis 4y ago
Anyone knows if the pf syncookie made it to 13.1? https://freebsdfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Porting-OpenBSDs-pf-syncookie-Code-to-FreeBSDs-pf.pdf https://freebsdfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Por...
- sehro 4y ago
  Matching releng/13.1 source to D31138, it did. Source: https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/sys/modules/pf/Makefile?h=releng/13.1 https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/sys/modules/pf/Makefile?h=... D31138: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D31138 https://reviews.freebsd.org/D31138
  - efortis 4y ago
    Thank you
Klonoar 4y ago
I know there's effort ongoing, and I'm sure it's a tired question at this point, but I have to ask: what is the deal with (the lack of) 802.11ac wifi in FreeBSD?
- loeg 4y ago
  Same as last time: implementing it is non-trivial and very few people are working on it.
- ComputerGuru 4y ago
  FreeBSD isn't really the most suitable choice for a laptop, which should be the only place you need to deal with wi-fi (and I say this as someone that's been using FreeBSD on the desktop and on servers for longer than I care to remember). Anyway, if you read the release notes this release uses the new/recent linux KPI infrastructure to use the Linux wi-fi drivers and stack via a shim, so presumably this will take care of all your kernel-resident problems (userland support is still a question mark)! See man pages below: > The iwlwifi(4) driver along with a LinuxKPI 802.11 compatibility layer was added to supplement iwm(4) for newer Intel Wireless chipsets. (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation) https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=iwlwifi&apropos=0&sektion=4&manpath=FreeBSD+14.0-current&arch=default&format=html https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=iwlwifi&apropos=0&... https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=iwm&apropos=0&sektion=4&manpath=FreeBSD+14.0-current&arch=default&format=html https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=iwm&apropos=0&sekt...
  - mulmen 4y ago
    I'm not sure that wifi = laptop. FreeBSD is an appealing choice as a firewall for example. I can imagine standardizing on FreeBSD across my networking devices and creating some kind of wifi AP using FreeBSD.
    - ComputerGuru 4y ago
      I've been running a FreeBSD-based network at home, at work, and at several other sites - one with hundreds of APs. The software infrastructure isn't (even remotely) there to run the entire WiFi backend off of FreeBSD and lack of 802.11ac or WiFi 6 isn't the biggest problem; the right solution is to deploy separate WiFi infra (sans any dhcp/routing/firewall/etc) hanging off the FreeBSD-powered LAN.
      - jsjohnst 4y ago
        > the right solution is to deploy separate WiFi infra (sans any dhcp/routing/firewall/etc) hanging off the FreeBSD-powered LAN Just came to say, this is exactly what I do. Firewall/router/dhcp/etc is FreeBSD and it’s great, but for wifi I use purpose built commercial grade hardware at home (Aruba personally, but honestly Ubiquiti, Meraki, Ruckus, etc would all be comparable).
- tedunangst 4y ago
  Just run your wifi driver in a Linux vm. https://github.com/pgj/freebsd-wifibox https://github.com/pgj/freebsd-wifibox
  - Klonoar 4y ago
    I'm beginning to think I should've coached my comment with lines acknowledging the basic responses like this. I'm aware of that project, though I appreciate the response nonetheless.
cperciva 4y ago
My contribution: FreeBSD 13.1 boots significantly faster than FreeBSD 13.0; in EC2 it's over a 2x speedup. I'll be talking about this at BSDCan in a few weeks. (Virtual conference, so it's not too late to sign up!)
- rwaksmunski 4y ago
  Thank you for what you do.
- stingraycharles 4y ago
  Awesome, how did you do that? We use plenty of short-lived FreeBSD agents for our (AWS-hosted) CI builds, so a 2x speed up would be very welcome!
  - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
    Boot Loader Changes This section covers the boot loader, boot menu, and other boot-related changes. Boot Loader Changes UEFI boot is improved for amd64. The loader detects whether the loaded kernel can handle the in-place staging area (non-copying mode). The default is copy_staging auto. Auto-detection can be overridden, for example: with copy_staging enable, the loader will unconditionally copy the staging area to 2M, regardless of kernel capabilities. Also, the code to grow the staging area is more robust; for growth to occur, it’s no longer necessary to hand-tune and recompile the loader. (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation) boot1 and loader have been fixed on powerpc64le. 8a62b07bce7 Other Boot Changes Performance improvements have been made to loader(8), nvme(4), random(4), rtsold(8), and x86 clock calibration, which collectively yield a significant speedup in system boot time. Configuration changes on the EC2 platform provide additional benefits, resulting in 13.1-RELEASE booting over twice as fast as 13.0-RELEASE. (Sponsored by https://www.patreon.com/cperciva https://www.patreon.com/cperciva) EC2 images are now built by default to boot using UEFI instead of legacy BIOS. Note that UEFI is not supported by Xen-based EC2 instances or by "bare metal" EC2 instances. 65f22ccf8247 (Sponsored by https://www.patreon.com/cperciva https://www.patreon.com/cperciva) Support was added for recording EC2 AMI Ids in the AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store. FreeBSD will be using the public prefix /aws/service/freebsd, resulting in parameter names which look like /aws/service/freebsd/amd64/base/ufs/13.1/RELEASE. 242d1c32e42c (Sponsored by https://www.patreon.com/cperciva https://www.patreon.com/cperciva)
smm11 4y ago
This is Unix I know this.
- copperx 4y ago
  I have never been as excited in a movie theater as when I heard that quote at 12.
spyremeown 4y ago
I like FreeBSD. It makes me happy. Thank you, FreeBSD contributors.
tiffanyh 4y ago
I love me some FreeBSD. I wish FreeBSD had something at the OS-level like NixOS. (yes I’m aware that nix packages exists)
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  Once nix works well we could just ("just") write nix packages for FreeBSD base, do... something for service management (openrc?), and then we have NixOS/FreeBSD. Not trivial, but doable.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
I switched one of my important boxes to FreeBSD a couple of weeks ago after chatting with an HN poster here. Foray into new lands for me. So far a very much simpler and pleasant experience from some of the more "fuller" (bloated) Linux distros of late. I may become a convert. One of the nice surprises was spinning up a couple of VMs using bhyve instead of qemu or vbox. Worked first time. Only one gripe - apparently really crap ext3/4 filesystem support. I still haven't managed to mount some important disks despite playing around with fusefs and all that. I'll crack it with time though.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  It's a kludge, but for pulling data off ext* you could run Linux in bhyve, pass in the device/partition, and then NFS mount back to the host.
- nix23 4y ago
  Oh nono, don't use the fuse-way for ext3/4, freebsd has builtin support for it...and it's muchmuchmuch better: # Load the kernel module kldload ext2fs # mount mount -t ext2fs -o ro /dev/<device/partition> <mountpoint> # Exmaples: mount -t ext2fs -o ro /dev/ad1s1 /mnt/ # Or on a different partition scheme (p vs s): mount -t ext2fs -o ro /dev/ada0p1 /mnt/ https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/howto-mount-ext4-without-fuse-avoiding-wrong-permissions.59520/ https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/howto-mount-ext4-without-...
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    Okay I'll check it out nix23. I thought I tried that, but will redouble efforts. Many thanks!
- infofarmer 4y ago
  > really crap ext3/4 filesystem support Sarcastic correction: almost decent support for really crap ext3/4 filesystem (As compared to either of UFS2 or ZFS) Fun fact: ~12 years ago I was able to recover 80%+ of data from some failing ext3 drives just by mounting from FreeBSD with ext2fs kld and opportunistic copying — whereas any version of Linux I tried would crash immediately after [ro] mounting.
rwaksmunski 4y ago
After dealing with Ubuntu all day at work it's such a breath of fresh air when I finally get to use FreeBSD at home. Thank you FreeBSD community for building and maintaining such a gem of an OS. Sincerely, happy user for 21 years now.
- whitepoplar 4y ago
  What do you like most about FreeBSD over Ubuntu?
  - rwaksmunski 4y ago
    Documentation, elegant simplicity, ports feature flags, POLA, ZFS, observability, instrumentation, integration. Almost every FreeBSD sub-system feels as if it was thought through and built by a passionate expert engineer.
    - systemvoltage 4y ago
      BSD License. Free, as in properly free. It's in the name. If you're a small business and want to build proprietary system, and don't have the money to shell out millions in licensing fees; FreeBSD is your system. It's the only way to beat mega corps and incumbents. FreeBSD keeps this asymmetry in check. Before someone comments about open source, there are reasons out of your hand to keep source code proprietary. For those applications, FreeBSD is a boon.
      - creatonez 4y ago
        > Before someone comments about open source, there are reasons out of your hand to keep source code proprietary Thing is, usually those reasons don't actually exclude the usage of GPL despite someone saying they do. Google is the biggest offender here, they have outright lied about the terms of GPLv2/3 in order to have quick and easy excuses to avoid it.
        systemvoltage 4y ago
tiffanyh 4y ago
Are there any plans for a “minimal” version of FreeBSD? (similar in concept to what various linux distros release, allowing for super slim servers OS)
- cperciva 4y ago
  That's one of the motivations for pkgbase. Which will land... checks notes... any decade now?
- ComputerGuru 4y ago
  What do you consider to be minimal? The base installation is slim enough that people have been using an install-per-jail for a long time. There are just a few problematic ports that need to pull in huge dependencies, but if you're not installing a web browser, the dependencies aren't usually a huge issue.
- queuebert 4y ago
  The number of definitions of a minimal install is maximal.
- nix23 4y ago
  Here you go buddy ;) https://github.com/michaeldexter/occambsd https://github.com/michaeldexter/occambsd But FreeBSD in itself is already as slim as ~possible (because no installed pkg's)
- mhio 4y ago
  mfsBSD was the minimal version I found (a few years ago) for use in a netboot environment (loads into memory) https://mfsbsd.vx.sk/ https://mfsbsd.vx.sk/
jedberg 4y ago
Congrats to the team! And a special thanks to cperciva for all the work he's done specifically for BSD in EC2. It's hard to imagine that my FreeBSD journey started with 3.1, and I'm glad to see it's still going strong (and why I keep donating to the project).
infinet 4y ago
I was hoping 13.1 has wireguard. Cannot find it.
- crest 4y ago
  The wireguard kernel module is available from ports and the 13.1 kernel should include the open crypto framework changes required allow if_wg(4) to make use of its fast SIMD-enabled multithreaded ChaCha20+Poly1305. Let's hope the next wireguard (for FreeBSD) release makes use of the new kernel features.
ComputerGuru 4y ago
Note that since FreeBSD 13, FreeBSD has been rebased and now uses ZFS on Linux rather than its own, separately developed and maintained ZFS stack. FreeBSD 13.1 upgrades to a newer release of ZoL, which is very important to note since the version that shipped with FreeBSD 13 had some notorious corruption bugs surrounding some of the newer ZoL features when sending/receiving snapshots with unmatched ZFS dataset record sizes or with native ZFS encryption (previously altogether unavailable for FreeBSD ZFS users) in use. ZoL is still ironing out the remaining corruption bugs in these features, but the snapshot in FreeBSD 13.1 is a much more reliable option than the one that shipped with v13. Note that users are not locked into the version that FreeBSD shipped with; you can actually installing rolling ZoL releases via ports/pkg and even use them for the system volume but that requires some reconfiguration (installing the port/pkg plus a minor conf file change to load the desired version of the ZFS kernel module) - but since most users don't do that, this should be a welcome upgrade.
- 1500100900 4y ago
  It uses OpenZFS.
- nix23 4y ago
  FreeBSD used Illumos as upstream, then changed to OpenZFS, OpenZFS is the central project who wants to provide ZFS for Linux,Illumos and BSD and maybe others in the future. https://openzfs.org/wiki/Main_Page https://openzfs.org/wiki/Main_Page >>The OpenZFS project brings together developers from the Linux, FreeBSD, illumos, MacOS, and Windows platforms. OpenZFS is supported by a wide range of companies.
xoa 4y ago
Anyone interested in FreeBSD and wondering about some of the upcoming stuff getting worked on might also want to keep an eye on the FreeBSD Foundation's updates on active development projects. For Q1 2022: https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/q1-2022-software-development-projects-update/ https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/q1-2022-software-developm... Lots of good stuff in the pipe, not just features like kernel WireGuard or improved WiFi but basic support stuff like improving/updating the Handbook.

134 points by SpaceInvader 4y ago

The very first computer I used was a FreeBSD machine sitting in a small dark closet of my parents' house. Now that I'm all grown up, I run it on a Raspberry Pi and it makes me very very happy. Such a joy to setup—so simple, so stable. Really happy to see that it keeps getting some love. :)

efortis 4y ago

Anyone knows if the pf syncookie made it to 13.1? https://freebsdfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Porting-OpenBSDs-pf-syncookie-Code-to-FreeBSDs-pf.pdf https://freebsdfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Por...

sehro 4y ago
Matching releng/13.1 source to D31138, it did. Source: https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/sys/modules/pf/Makefile?h=releng/13.1 https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/sys/modules/pf/Makefile?h=... D31138: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D31138 https://reviews.freebsd.org/D31138
- efortis 4y ago
  Thank you

Klonoar 4y ago

I know there's effort ongoing, and I'm sure it's a tired question at this point, but I have to ask: what is the deal with (the lack of) 802.11ac wifi in FreeBSD?

loeg 4y ago
Same as last time: implementing it is non-trivial and very few people are working on it.
ComputerGuru 4y ago
FreeBSD isn't really the most suitable choice for a laptop, which should be the only place you need to deal with wi-fi (and I say this as someone that's been using FreeBSD on the desktop and on servers for longer than I care to remember). Anyway, if you read the release notes this release uses the new/recent linux KPI infrastructure to use the Linux wi-fi drivers and stack via a shim, so presumably this will take care of all your kernel-resident problems (userland support is still a question mark)! See man pages below: > The iwlwifi(4) driver along with a LinuxKPI 802.11 compatibility layer was added to supplement iwm(4) for newer Intel Wireless chipsets. (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation) https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=iwlwifi&apropos=0&sektion=4&manpath=FreeBSD+14.0-current&arch=default&format=html https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=iwlwifi&apropos=0&... https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=iwm&apropos=0&sektion=4&manpath=FreeBSD+14.0-current&arch=default&format=html https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=iwm&apropos=0&sekt...
- mulmen 4y ago
  I'm not sure that wifi = laptop. FreeBSD is an appealing choice as a firewall for example. I can imagine standardizing on FreeBSD across my networking devices and creating some kind of wifi AP using FreeBSD.
  - ComputerGuru 4y ago
    I've been running a FreeBSD-based network at home, at work, and at several other sites - one with hundreds of APs. The software infrastructure isn't (even remotely) there to run the entire WiFi backend off of FreeBSD and lack of 802.11ac or WiFi 6 isn't the biggest problem; the right solution is to deploy separate WiFi infra (sans any dhcp/routing/firewall/etc) hanging off the FreeBSD-powered LAN.
    - jsjohnst 4y ago
      > the right solution is to deploy separate WiFi infra (sans any dhcp/routing/firewall/etc) hanging off the FreeBSD-powered LAN Just came to say, this is exactly what I do. Firewall/router/dhcp/etc is FreeBSD and it’s great, but for wifi I use purpose built commercial grade hardware at home (Aruba personally, but honestly Ubiquiti, Meraki, Ruckus, etc would all be comparable).
tedunangst 4y ago
Just run your wifi driver in a Linux vm. https://github.com/pgj/freebsd-wifibox https://github.com/pgj/freebsd-wifibox
- Klonoar 4y ago
  I'm beginning to think I should've coached my comment with lines acknowledging the basic responses like this. I'm aware of that project, though I appreciate the response nonetheless.

cperciva 4y ago

My contribution: FreeBSD 13.1 boots significantly faster than FreeBSD 13.0; in EC2 it's over a 2x speedup. I'll be talking about this at BSDCan in a few weeks. (Virtual conference, so it's not too late to sign up!)

rwaksmunski 4y ago
Thank you for what you do.
stingraycharles 4y ago
Awesome, how did you do that? We use plenty of short-lived FreeBSD agents for our (AWS-hosted) CI builds, so a 2x speed up would be very welcome!
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  Boot Loader Changes This section covers the boot loader, boot menu, and other boot-related changes. Boot Loader Changes UEFI boot is improved for amd64. The loader detects whether the loaded kernel can handle the in-place staging area (non-copying mode). The default is copy_staging auto. Auto-detection can be overridden, for example: with copy_staging enable, the loader will unconditionally copy the staging area to 2M, regardless of kernel capabilities. Also, the code to grow the staging area is more robust; for growth to occur, it’s no longer necessary to hand-tune and recompile the loader. (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation) boot1 and loader have been fixed on powerpc64le. 8a62b07bce7 Other Boot Changes Performance improvements have been made to loader(8), nvme(4), random(4), rtsold(8), and x86 clock calibration, which collectively yield a significant speedup in system boot time. Configuration changes on the EC2 platform provide additional benefits, resulting in 13.1-RELEASE booting over twice as fast as 13.0-RELEASE. (Sponsored by https://www.patreon.com/cperciva https://www.patreon.com/cperciva) EC2 images are now built by default to boot using UEFI instead of legacy BIOS. Note that UEFI is not supported by Xen-based EC2 instances or by "bare metal" EC2 instances. 65f22ccf8247 (Sponsored by https://www.patreon.com/cperciva https://www.patreon.com/cperciva) Support was added for recording EC2 AMI Ids in the AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store. FreeBSD will be using the public prefix /aws/service/freebsd, resulting in parameter names which look like /aws/service/freebsd/amd64/base/ufs/13.1/RELEASE. 242d1c32e42c (Sponsored by https://www.patreon.com/cperciva https://www.patreon.com/cperciva)

smm11 4y ago

This is Unix I know this.

copperx 4y ago
I have never been as excited in a movie theater as when I heard that quote at 12.

spyremeown 4y ago

I like FreeBSD. It makes me happy. Thank you, FreeBSD contributors.

tiffanyh 4y ago

I love me some FreeBSD. I wish FreeBSD had something at the OS-level like NixOS. (yes I’m aware that nix packages exists)

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
Once nix works well we could just ("just") write nix packages for FreeBSD base, do... something for service management (openrc?), and then we have NixOS/FreeBSD. Not trivial, but doable.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

I switched one of my important boxes to FreeBSD a couple of weeks ago after chatting with an HN poster here. Foray into new lands for me. So far a very much simpler and pleasant experience from some of the more "fuller" (bloated) Linux distros of late. I may become a convert. One of the nice surprises was spinning up a couple of VMs using bhyve instead of qemu or vbox. Worked first time. Only one gripe - apparently really crap ext3/4 filesystem support. I still haven't managed to mount some important disks despite playing around with fusefs and all that. I'll crack it with time though.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
It's a kludge, but for pulling data off ext* you could run Linux in bhyve, pass in the device/partition, and then NFS mount back to the host.
nix23 4y ago
Oh nono, don't use the fuse-way for ext3/4, freebsd has builtin support for it...and it's muchmuchmuch better: # Load the kernel module kldload ext2fs # mount mount -t ext2fs -o ro /dev/<device/partition> <mountpoint> # Exmaples: mount -t ext2fs -o ro /dev/ad1s1 /mnt/ # Or on a different partition scheme (p vs s): mount -t ext2fs -o ro /dev/ada0p1 /mnt/ https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/howto-mount-ext4-without-fuse-avoiding-wrong-permissions.59520/ https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/howto-mount-ext4-without-...
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Okay I'll check it out nix23. I thought I tried that, but will redouble efforts. Many thanks!
infofarmer 4y ago
> really crap ext3/4 filesystem support Sarcastic correction: almost decent support for really crap ext3/4 filesystem (As compared to either of UFS2 or ZFS) Fun fact: ~12 years ago I was able to recover 80%+ of data from some failing ext3 drives just by mounting from FreeBSD with ext2fs kld and opportunistic copying — whereas any version of Linux I tried would crash immediately after [ro] mounting.

rwaksmunski 4y ago

After dealing with Ubuntu all day at work it's such a breath of fresh air when I finally get to use FreeBSD at home. Thank you FreeBSD community for building and maintaining such a gem of an OS. Sincerely, happy user for 21 years now.

whitepoplar 4y ago
What do you like most about FreeBSD over Ubuntu?
- rwaksmunski 4y ago
  Documentation, elegant simplicity, ports feature flags, POLA, ZFS, observability, instrumentation, integration. Almost every FreeBSD sub-system feels as if it was thought through and built by a passionate expert engineer.
  - systemvoltage 4y ago
    BSD License. Free, as in properly free. It's in the name. If you're a small business and want to build proprietary system, and don't have the money to shell out millions in licensing fees; FreeBSD is your system. It's the only way to beat mega corps and incumbents. FreeBSD keeps this asymmetry in check. Before someone comments about open source, there are reasons out of your hand to keep source code proprietary. For those applications, FreeBSD is a boon.
    - creatonez 4y ago
      > Before someone comments about open source, there are reasons out of your hand to keep source code proprietary Thing is, usually those reasons don't actually exclude the usage of GPL despite someone saying they do. Google is the biggest offender here, they have outright lied about the terms of GPLv2/3 in order to have quick and easy excuses to avoid it.
      - systemvoltage 4y ago

tiffanyh 4y ago

Are there any plans for a “minimal” version of FreeBSD? (similar in concept to what various linux distros release, allowing for super slim servers OS)

cperciva 4y ago
That's one of the motivations for pkgbase. Which will land... checks notes... any decade now?
ComputerGuru 4y ago
What do you consider to be minimal? The base installation is slim enough that people have been using an install-per-jail for a long time. There are just a few problematic ports that need to pull in huge dependencies, but if you're not installing a web browser, the dependencies aren't usually a huge issue.
queuebert 4y ago
The number of definitions of a minimal install is maximal.
nix23 4y ago
Here you go buddy ;) https://github.com/michaeldexter/occambsd https://github.com/michaeldexter/occambsd But FreeBSD in itself is already as slim as ~possible (because no installed pkg's)
mhio 4y ago
mfsBSD was the minimal version I found (a few years ago) for use in a netboot environment (loads into memory) https://mfsbsd.vx.sk/ https://mfsbsd.vx.sk/

jedberg 4y ago

Congrats to the team! And a special thanks to cperciva for all the work he's done specifically for BSD in EC2. It's hard to imagine that my FreeBSD journey started with 3.1, and I'm glad to see it's still going strong (and why I keep donating to the project).

infinet 4y ago

I was hoping 13.1 has wireguard. Cannot find it.

crest 4y ago
The wireguard kernel module is available from ports and the 13.1 kernel should include the open crypto framework changes required allow if_wg(4) to make use of its fast SIMD-enabled multithreaded ChaCha20+Poly1305. Let's hope the next wireguard (for FreeBSD) release makes use of the new kernel features.

ComputerGuru 4y ago

Note that since FreeBSD 13, FreeBSD has been rebased and now uses ZFS on Linux rather than its own, separately developed and maintained ZFS stack. FreeBSD 13.1 upgrades to a newer release of ZoL, which is very important to note since the version that shipped with FreeBSD 13 had some notorious corruption bugs surrounding some of the newer ZoL features when sending/receiving snapshots with unmatched ZFS dataset record sizes or with native ZFS encryption (previously altogether unavailable for FreeBSD ZFS users) in use. ZoL is still ironing out the remaining corruption bugs in these features, but the snapshot in FreeBSD 13.1 is a much more reliable option than the one that shipped with v13. Note that users are not locked into the version that FreeBSD shipped with; you can actually installing rolling ZoL releases via ports/pkg and even use them for the system volume but that requires some reconfiguration (installing the port/pkg plus a minor conf file change to load the desired version of the ZFS kernel module) - but since most users don't do that, this should be a welcome upgrade.

1500100900 4y ago
It uses OpenZFS.
nix23 4y ago
FreeBSD used Illumos as upstream, then changed to OpenZFS, OpenZFS is the central project who wants to provide ZFS for Linux,Illumos and BSD and maybe others in the future. https://openzfs.org/wiki/Main_Page https://openzfs.org/wiki/Main_Page >>The OpenZFS project brings together developers from the Linux, FreeBSD, illumos, MacOS, and Windows platforms. OpenZFS is supported by a wide range of companies.

xoa 4y ago

Anyone interested in FreeBSD and wondering about some of the upcoming stuff getting worked on might also want to keep an eye on the FreeBSD Foundation's updates on active development projects. For Q1 2022: https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/q1-2022-software-development-projects-update/ https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/q1-2022-software-developm... Lots of good stuff in the pipe, not just features like kernel WireGuard or improved WiFi but basic support stuff like improving/updating the Handbook.