The First FreeBSD 15 Beta Is Here, and It’s Dropping Most 32-bit Devices
FreeBSD 15, the next major update to the free and open source operating system, is now available in beta. If you’re considering FreeBSD as a possible alternative to Linux, or just want to try it in a virtual machine, there are a few new features and a ton of minor changes.
FreeBSD is still a Unix-like operating system with a kernel, device drivers, user utilities, and documentation all managed in the same project. Most utilities, applications, and desktop environments in the Linux ecosystem are available natively for FreeBSD, and other Linux software can run unmodified with Linuxulator. Desktop Linux remains the best option for an open source operating system for your PC, but FreeBSD 15 is shaping up to be another solid release.
First, some improvements have been made to hardware compatibility. Intel Tiger Lake-H and Meteor Lake processors now get better driver support, there is a new rtw89 driver for some Realktek wireless hardware, and NVMe support is now enabled on all hardware architectures.
FreeBSD 15 includes “many improvements to the networking stack, including performance improvements and bug fixes for the sctp stack.” Many changes have also been made to the bootloader, such as faster ACPI detection in EFI mode, and the LinuxBootloader can now boot FreeBSD from x86 and ARM 64-bit systems. The changelog also mentions “many improvements to the audio stack,” including support for sense swapping in the audio mixer.
The FreeBSD installer has a useful improvement in this release: firmware packages can now be downloaded and installed after the base system installation is complete. Finally, many applications and utilities have been updated, including date, less, file, OpenSSH and OpenSSL, and grep.
FreeBSD 15 also drops support for most 32-bit devices, following the same change in Debian, Fedora, Windows 11 and other operating systems. This includes armv6 processors, 32-bit x86 (i386) processors, and 32-bit PowerPC hardware. The developers said in June: “While there have been some requests to retain full support for these platforms, we have not seen an increase in developer interest or willingness to support these platforms.”
You can download FreeBSD 15 Beta 1 as an installation disk, virtual machine image, or OCI container image. It is available for 64-bit x86 PCs, 64-bit PowerPCs (powerpc64 and powerpc64le), ARMv7, 64-bit ARM (aarch64), and RISC-V. There may be bugs and outdated documentation, as this is not the final version, so do not install it on critical hardware.
Source: FreeBSD via DistroWatch
