The Launch of New Version of FreeBSD — FreeBSD 13.3

On Tuesday, March 5, a new version of FreeBSD 13.3 was introduced, which will be the latest update for the stable 13th series of the BSD platform. FreeBSD 13.3 can be downloaded for all major architectures, from amd64 to riscv64, although the update is most relevant for users who have not yet upgraded to FreeBSD 14.

One of the main features of FreeBSD 13.3 is the automatic activation of the power management daemon powered on the image for ARM64 Raspberry Pi. Much attention was also paid to updating the WiFi drivers for FreeBSD, which can now support more stable functioning. The update uses OpenZFS 2.1.14 to support the ZFS file system and adds support for Google's virtual network interface via the GVE driver.

But that's not all the changes. FreeBSD 13.3 offers the following improvements:

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• Updated iwlwifi and rtw88 drivers for Intel and Realtek wireless cards;
• Ability to run NFS servers (nfsd, nfsuserd, mountd, gssd, and rpc.tlsservd) in Jail with an isolated vnet network environment;
• The Clang compiler and LLVM tools have been updated to branch 17;
• Ability to specify umask values for individual services in rc conf;
• Option to prioritize programs that use the setusercontext (login process) call in ~/.login_conf or login.conf;
• Setting flags for the diff utility in rc.conf;
• Support for -q (quiet) and -v (verbose) and the use of C units of change in numeric arguments in the head and tail utilities;
• Including the objdump utility in the LLVM project;
• The "-S" option was added to tftpd, which allows you to organize writing to files in the chroot environment that are not available for general writing;
• Previously unavailable option to organize writing to files in the chroot environment using the "-S" option in tftpd;
• Updated manual for kernel program interfaces;
• Analysis of file system and vnode deferral statistics within the vfs.vnode sysctl series;
• Disabling the request for host information (RFC 4620);
• Application of packet redirection rules (rdr) from the current host with local delivery in the packet filter pf;
• Support for gve virtual network adapters (Google Virtual NIC);
• End of support for BeagleBone Black (armv7) boards;
• Updates to OpenSSH 9.6p1, Sendmail 8.18.1, expat 2.6.0, libfido2 1.13.0, nvi 2.2.1, unbound 1.19.1, xz 5.4.5, zlib 1.3.1.