Linux isn’t the only open-source operating system (OS). There are also a number of Unix-like open-source BSD operating systems, including FreeBSD, that are still in active development.
The FreeBSD Project, first released in 1993, is one of the earliest open-source OS projects, and is a direct descendent of the original open-source BSD work performed at the University of California at Berkeley. This week, FreeBSD 14 became generally available, marking the first major version number update for the open-source operating system since 2021. This first stable release on the 14 branch brings significant updates and new features to the open-source operating system.
“FreeBSD 14 represents a combination of some new features and a lot of updates to various subsystems to improve performance, stability and security,” Ed Maste, senior director of technology for the FreeBSD Foundation, told SDxCentral.
ZFS gets a big filesystem boost in FreeBSD 14
Among the new features in FreeBSD 14 is an update of the ZFS filesystem to the OpenZFS 2.2 release.
ZFS has its roots in the Oracle (previously Sun Microsystems) Solaris UNIX OS and has long held the promise of supporting very large storage volumes. Maste noted that OpenZFS 2.2 includes enhancements like block cloning, which provides a massive performance boost for copy-heavy workloads. In addition to improvements in OpenZFS itself, new tooling has been added and updated to improve the integration of ZFS in FreeBSD.
There have also been updates to make ZFS work better in virtualized environments, and FreeBSD added ZFS support to the makefs image creation tool.
“This allows the FreeBSD release engineering team to start building root-on-ZFS images for cloud providers,” Maste said.
FreeBSD 14 boosts security and scalability
The new release also includes a number of security improvements.
Maste noted that FreeBSD’s Capsicum sandbox framework has been applied to additional tools in the base system. There have also been updates to critical security packages including OpenSSL in the base system to 3.0.12 and OpenSSH to version 9.5p1.
Performance and scalability are also being improved alongside enhanced hardware support.
“There are also changes to support contemporary hardware – such as increasing the supported CPU count to 1024,” Maste said.
He added that there is also a large set of usability and “fit and finish” improvements like reduced boot time, addressing incompatibilities with some UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) firmware implementations, improved NVMe device error handling, and so on.
Why FreeBSD still matters — particularly for networking
While Linux may well be more widely known as an open-source OS across many enterprises, FreeBSD is certainly no stranger, especially for network systems.
“Networking continues to be a strong suit, and many companies, including Juniper, rely on, and contribute code to improve, FreeBSD’s networking capabilities,” Maste said. “Other companies at the vanguard of networking security and performance that use and contribute to FreeBSD are Netflix, Nvidia Mellanox Metify, Netgate, Chelsio, and Nginx (F5).”
In the case of Juniper, the Junos network OS is based on FreeBSD. Maste noted that the business-friendly BSD open-source license also makes it attractive to companies that want no encumbrances when combining their OS with proprietary software as part of a product.
“We therefore see a lot of FreeBSD as a foundation for purpose-built security, networking and industrial control appliances; SaaS solutions; and platforms,” he said.
Maste also noted that FreeBSD underpins several leading payment processing networks, including DeepStack (now part of Banc of California), Modirum and others. Enterprise-grade storage is another market where FreeBSD is popular and helps to power solutions from Avere Systems (now part of Microsoft), EMC Isilon and NetApp.
Looking forward, Maste said that the FreeBSD core team is starting the planning process to identify the community’s development priorities. The FreeBSD Foundation is a separate entity, but those priorities will help inform the foundation’s software development efforts.
“One priority the foundation does have for the next year or two is improving the end-user out-of-the-box experience with FreeBSD,” Maste said. “If you’re someone who wants to learn about or explore systems programming, we want FreeBSD to provide an excellent place to get started.”