FreeBSD is a UNIX-like operating system based on the “4.4BSD-Lite” released by the University of California at Berkeley with some “4.4BSD-Lite2” enhancements for i386, amd64, IA-64, arm, MIPS, PowerPC, ppc64, PC -98, UltraSPARC, and other platforms.
FreeBSD includes a number of other great features:
- Firewalls: The base system includes IPFW and IPFilter, as well as a modified version of the popular pf with improved SMP performance. IPFW also includes the dummynet feature, allowing network administrators to simulate adverse network conditions, including latency, jitter, packet loss and limited bandwidth.
- Jails are a light-weight alternative to virtualization. Allowing processes to be restricted to a namespace with access only to the file systems and network addresses assigned to that namespace. Jails are also Hierarchical, allowing jails-within-jails.
- Linux emulation provides a system call translation layer that allows unmodified Linux binaries to be run on FreeBSD systems.
- DTrace provides a comprehensive framework for tracing and troubleshooting kernel and application performance issues while under live load.
- The Ports Collection is a set of more than 23,000 third party applications that can be easily installed and run on FreeBSD. The ports architecture also allows for easy customization of the compile time options of many of the applications.
- Network Virtualization: A container (“vimage”) has been implemented, extending the FreeBSD kernel to maintain multiple independent instances of networking state. Vimage facilities can be used independently to create fully virtualized network topologies, and jail(8) can directly take advantage of a fully virtualized network stack.
FreeBSD 13.1 was released.
Changelog
Some of the highlights:
- OpenSSH has been updated to version v8.8p1.
- OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.1.1o.
- The use of FIDO/U2F hardware authenticators has been enabled in ssh, using the new public key types ecdsa-sk and ed25519-sk, along with corresponding certificate types.
- The ice(4) driver has been updated to 1.34.2-k, adding firmware logging and initial DCB support.
- The iwlwifi(4) driver along with a LinuxKPI 802.11 compatibility layer was added to supplement iwm(4) for newer Intel Wireless chipsets.
- ZFS has been upgraded to OpenZFS release 2.1.4.
- EC2 images are now built by default to boot using UEFI instead of legacy BIOS.
- And much more…
