The FreeBSD project issued today their Q3'2024 progress report to outline enhancements made to this open-source BSD operating system over the prior quarter.

The FreeBSD developers remain very busy and some of their Q3-2024 accomplishments include:

- The FreeBSD release team has decided to reduce the support timeline from five to four years. After the four year period of FreeBSD release support, there will be a "best effort" support attempt.

- [1]AMD's collaboration with the FreeBSD Foundation continues. One of the ongoing joint AMD + FreeBSD projects is to develop an AMD IOMMU driver for the platform. This AMD IOMMU driver is nearing completion and testing is ongoing with AMD large-core-count servers.

- As part of the collaboration between the FreeBSD Foundation and Quantum Leap Research for [2]improving FreeBSD laptop support , the Intel and AMD graphics drivers are seeing updates. There is also ongoing work for better WiFi support, enhancing power management, audio improvements, and other laptop hardware feature work.

- FreeBSD 14.2 release preparations are underway with [3]FreeBSD 14.2 Beta 1 recently debuting. They hope to issue FreeBSD 14.2-RELEASE around early December.

- The FreeBSD audio mixer has implemented hot-swapping, there is now a sound dummy driver, and other sound support work.

- Changes are being made to dhclient to speed-up the FreeBSD boot process. Google sponsored this work via GSOC to "boot significantly faster" for the OS -- about two seconds.

- A project started to bring FreeBSD to the PinePhone Pro.

- AArch64 SIMD enhancements are being made for better performance on ARM.

The report in full can be read over on [4]FreeBSD.org .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Q2-2024-Improvements

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Better-Laptops

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-14.2-Beta-1-Released

[4] https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2024-07-2024-09/