FreeBSD is a Unix-like operating system that includes security, native ZFS file system, built-in DTrace, Jails, and excellent network performance. Many companies have customized their own products based on FreeBSD’s system layer. Some of the big names include macOS, iOS, OPNsense, pfSense, FreeNAS among others.
Especially after the release of the 12.0 version of the software, the entire system has very good stability and has been significantly improved in performance.
Now, FreeBSD 12.1 has been released as the first incremental update to last year’s FreeBSD 12. The current FreeBSD already supports the latest desktop environments such as KDE Plasma 5.17.x / Wayland / Gnome 3.28.x. It is more convenient to use as a personal workstation system with the package manager.
This version is a small version of the 12.x series which stabilizes the features of the FreeBSD 12.x series and also improves the version of the base software.
Some notable changes with FreeBSD 12.1 are:
- Many security updates/fixes from kernel memory disclosures and denial of service issues to buffer overflows.
- GCC (4.2) on FreeBSD dropped the “-Werror” by default.
- The bundled Gzip utility now supports “-l” for XZ files.
- Updates to its LLVM Clang toolchain up to version 8.0.1.
- The LLD linker is now used by default on i386.
- The libomp OpenMP library for LLVM Clang is now shipped by default.
- The amdsmn/amdtemp drivers now support Ryzen 2 host bridges and correct thermal reporting for the Threadripper 2990WX.
- The FUSE file-system driver has new features and better performance.
Some superb updates includes,
- Introduced BearSSL into the underlying system
- Upgradation of clang, llvm, lld, lldb, compiler-rt toolset, and libc++ based on the LLVM architecture to version 8.0.1
- OpenSSL upgrade to version 1.1.1d
To learn more about FreeBSD 12.1 operating system, check out the official release notes from here.
