bsd-user-4-linux Lets FreeBSD Binaries Run Unmodified On Linux
([BSD] 2 Hours Ago
FreeBSD Q2-2025)
- Reference: 0001572891
- News link: https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Q2-2025-Status-Report
- Source link:
The FreeBSD project on Friday published their quarterly status report to highlight all of the interesting changes for Q2'2025. Among the recent FreeBSD efforts have been on "bsd-user-4-linux" to allow FreeBSD binaries to run unmodified on Linux systems. FreeBSD is also coming up with a policy around AI/LLM usage for contributing to the project. Additionally, Sylve is taking shape as a new web-based unified system management platform for FreeBSD systems.
Some of the most interesting FreeBSD Q2-2025 highlights include:
- The FreeBSD Core Team is investigating the creation of a policy around LLM/AI usage such as for code generation.
- FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE made its debut while preparations are underway for FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE to arrive in December.
- FreeBSD 15.0 snapshots have begun adding the ability to the OS installer so users can fetch and install packages from pkg.freebsd.org instead of using the legacy distribution sets.
- The bsd-user-4-linux project allows BSD user-mode emulation for QEMU on Linux. The goal is to run unmodified FreeBSD binaries on modern Linux systems. The initial bsd-user-4-linux port is able to successfully run a build world with multiple jobs. FreeBSD's sd, bash, clang, find, grep, git, clang, and other binaries are working on Linux. Granted, those programs are also natively available for Linux.
- Sylve is being developed as a unified system management platform for FreeBSD inspired by Proxmox. Sylve will offer the ability to manage ZFS storage, FreeBSD Jails, Bhyve VMs, and more.
- Coming about via Google Summer of Code is Geomman as a new partition tool based on sade that provides a modern text user interface driven means of managing partitions.
- Many FreeBSD sound improvements.
- Continued work on suspend/resume and s0ix sleep support for enhancing FreeBSD on laptops.
- Work on porting Apple's HFS+ file-system to FreeBSD so that it can be used with older Apple devices relying on this file-system/
See the complete [1]Q2 status report for those wanting to learn more about all of the FreeBSD efforts during Q2.
[1] https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2025-04-2025-06/
Some of the most interesting FreeBSD Q2-2025 highlights include:
- The FreeBSD Core Team is investigating the creation of a policy around LLM/AI usage such as for code generation.
- FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE made its debut while preparations are underway for FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE to arrive in December.
- FreeBSD 15.0 snapshots have begun adding the ability to the OS installer so users can fetch and install packages from pkg.freebsd.org instead of using the legacy distribution sets.
- The bsd-user-4-linux project allows BSD user-mode emulation for QEMU on Linux. The goal is to run unmodified FreeBSD binaries on modern Linux systems. The initial bsd-user-4-linux port is able to successfully run a build world with multiple jobs. FreeBSD's sd, bash, clang, find, grep, git, clang, and other binaries are working on Linux. Granted, those programs are also natively available for Linux.
- Sylve is being developed as a unified system management platform for FreeBSD inspired by Proxmox. Sylve will offer the ability to manage ZFS storage, FreeBSD Jails, Bhyve VMs, and more.
- Coming about via Google Summer of Code is Geomman as a new partition tool based on sade that provides a modern text user interface driven means of managing partitions.
- Many FreeBSD sound improvements.
- Continued work on suspend/resume and s0ix sleep support for enhancing FreeBSD on laptops.
- Work on porting Apple's HFS+ file-system to FreeBSD so that it can be used with older Apple devices relying on this file-system/
See the complete [1]Q2 status report for those wanting to learn more about all of the FreeBSD efforts during Q2.
[1] https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2025-04-2025-06/
Volta