While [1]FreeBSD 15 stable was officially released earlier this month, MidnightBSD continues plotting its own course atop its FreeBSD 13 base. Out today is MidnightBSD 4.0 as the latest iteration of this desktop-minded BSD operating system.

MidnightBSD 4.0 incorporates the latest updates from the FreeBSD 13 series, updates many third-party libraries, and features the latest iteration of its mport package manager. The mport verify functionality is now more robust, improved color handling for the TUI, and other changes.

MidnightBSD 4.0 also now enforces W^X memory mapping policy for user processes, RC/init changes, removing the GPL-licensed version of DTC in favor of the BSD-licensed version, Safe Memory Reclamation (SMR) support for its kernel, support for Intel Speed Shift is added to CPUFreq, NFS updates, and the ZFS implementation is now used from OpenZFS.

There are also dozens more kernel changes picked up for MidnightBSD 4.0 as well as enhancements to the likes of the Bhyve hypervisor for virtualization. Plus numerous security fixes too.

On the hardware support side, MidnightBSD 4.0 defaults to a new USB HID driver, has basic support for Intel Alder Lake CPUs within the HWPMC driver, support for more Realtek WiFi PCI adapters, Intel BE200 support in the IWLWIFI driver, AGP is deprecated, and various other improvements.

More details on the MidnightBSD 4.0 changes can be found via the [2]release notes . MidnightBSD 4.0 can be downloaded at [3]MidnightBSD.org .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/FreeBSD+15

[2] https://www.midnightbsd.org/notes/4.0/index.html

[3] https://www.midnightbsd.org/download/