My contribution: FreeBSD 13.1 boots significantly faster than FreeBSD 13.0; in EC2 it's over a 2x speedup.<p>I'll be talking about this at BSDCan in a few weeks. (Virtual conference, so it's not too late to sign up!)
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.<p>One of the nice surprises was spinning up a couple of VMs using bhyve
instead of qemu or vbox. Worked first time.<p>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.
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.
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?
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.<p>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.<p>Note that users are <i>not</i> 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.
Congrats to the team! And a special thanks to cperciva for all the work he's done specifically for BSD in EC2.<p>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).
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.<p>Such a joy to setup—so simple, so stable. Really happy to see that it keeps getting some love. :)
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:<p><a href="https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/q1-2022-software-development-projects-update/" rel="nofollow">https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/q1-2022-software-developm...</a><p>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.
Are there any plans for a “minimal” version of FreeBSD?<p>(similar in concept to what various linux distros release, allowing for super slim servers OS)
Anyone knows if the pf syncookie made it to 13.1?<p><a href="https://freebsdfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Porting-OpenBSDs-pf-syncookie-Code-to-FreeBSDs-pf.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://freebsdfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Por...</a>