FreeBSD 13 features

I do not follow -current closely. However, when I read the release schedule I became excited ... roughly 3 months to go. What featues will we get, maybe a dev or someone with more knowledge could provide some quick overview, or give a link to relevant mails in the mailing lists.

I am interested in the migration to OpenZFS 2.0, bhyve pause/migrate + other features/speedups, NFS+TLS, better wifi support (.ac, hostapd, ath10k driver...), linux compatibility layer, wireguard kernel integration, all stuff security related or performance improving (especially regarding the issues I have with swapping/memory), stuff around jails ...
 
There's often a nice list here: https://wiki.freebsd.org/WhatsNew
But it looks like it hasn't been added for 13 yet.

Release notes haven't been written yet either, but that's typically done when things are being finalized. Up to the code slush things can still change quite a bit. Once stable/13 has been created things are more or less set and no major changes can happen.
 
oh, yes, forgot p9fs for bhyve to mention - great ... wireguard in kernel seems like it is planned for version 14, also 802.11ac, VPP on netmap, eBPF and - oh wow! - NetBSDs NPF.
There was a detailed discussion about some of these features on the last day of "November 2020 FreeBSD Vendor Summit".
I can't exactly the timestamp, but it's available online on streaming video websites.
 
anyone knows the state of W^X (write xor execute) and whether we get full ASLR (and not just ASR)?
 
I liked the simple bootloader from old FreeBSD best.
No "information" overload.
Instead, quick navigation between drives/partitions to boot.

Maybe one can implement this in Lua :)
 
Here I cannot resist to comment. The bootloader is visible for seconds. I have no idea why it should be more beautiful.
The advantage is that the graphics support (UEFI frame buffer) is available throughout the boot process (well, I assume it is, because it wouldn’t make sense otherwise). So you get a high-resolution console.
 
I do not follow -current closely. However, when I read the release schedule I became excited ... roughly 3 months to go. What featues will we get, maybe a dev or someone with more knowledge could provide some quick overview, or give a link to relevant mails in the mailing lists.
It is not only interesting what new things are coming, but also what old things are going away. FreeBSD 13 will drop support for quite a few things, see https://wiki.freebsd.org/WhatsGoing/FreeBSD13 for details.
 
Anyone noticed if something will actually break? Like common packages etc?
Do you have anything specific in mind? I've installed on Intel NUC, Dell server (Poweredge T330 with hardware RAID5) and so on and UEFI installs work perfectly and the "common" packages I used (e.g. vim and MySQL) work fine.

Do you mean more desktop packages or browsers or something else?
 
I've been running 13, hrrm, I think it's up to RC-1 last time I looked, for awhile, and it's not broken anything. It *looks* like it's going to be a safe upgrade on my main machine. (But I will use beadm, just in case.).
 
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The good thing about the bootloader having graphics through LUA, is that it means a console (not necessarily the default) can have the ability to show pictures on it, to start a basic graphical program (one not like not ncurses) without needing a window manager (or Windows like DOS used to do), or to split the screen between monitors. Not that this would be needed.

FreeBSD 13 looks great. LLVM and its toolchain is expected to be much better, and complete. Hopefully, 3 different versions of the toolchain will no longer be needed.
 
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