New FreeBSD 15 Retires 32-Bit Ports and Modernizes Builds

FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE arrived this week, notes this report from The Register, which calls it the latest release "of the Unix world's leading alternative to Linux." As well as numerous bug fixes and upgrades to many of its components, the major changes in this version are reductions in the number of platforms the OS supports, and in how it's built and how its component software is packaged. FreeBSD 15 has significantly reduced support for 32-bit platforms. Compared to FreeBSD 14 in 2023, there are no longer builds for x86-32, POWER, or ARM-v6. As the release notes put it: "The venerable 32-bit hardware platforms i386, armv6, and 32-bit powerpc have been retired. 32-bit application support lives on via the 32-bit compatibility mode in their respective 64-bit platforms. The armv7 platform remains as the last supported 32-bit platform. We thank them for their service." Now FreeBSD supports five CPU architectures - two Tier-1 platforms, x86-64 and AArch64, and three Tier-2 platforms, armv7 and up, powerpc64le, and riscv64. Arguably, it's time. AMD's first 64-bit chips started shipping 22 years ago. Intel launched the original x86 chip, the 8086 in 1978. These days, 64-bit is nearly as old as the entire Intel 80x86 platform was when the 64-bit versions first appeared. In comparison, a few months ago, Debian13 also dropped its x86-32 edition - six years after Canonical launched its first x86-64-only distro, Ubuntu 19.10. Another significant change is that this is the first version built under the new pkgbase system, although it's still experimental and optional for now. If you opt for a pkgbase installation, then the core OS itself is installed from multiple separate software packages,meaning that the whole system can be updated using the packagemanager. Over in the Linux world, this is the norm, but Linux is avery different beast... The plan is that by FreeBSD 16, scheduledfor December 2027, the restructure will be complete, the olddistribution sets will be removed, and the current freebsd-updatecommand and its associated infrastructure can be turned off. Another significant change is reproduciblebuilds, a milestone the project reachedin late October. This change is part of a multi-projectinitiative toward ensuring deterministic compilation: to be ableto demonstrate that a certain set of source files and compilationdirectives is guaranteed to produce identical binaries, as acountermeasure against compromised code. A handy side-effect is thatbuilding the whole OS, including installation media images, no longerneeds root access. There are of course other new features. Lots of drivers andsubsystems have been updated, and this release has better powermanagement, including suspend and resume. There's improved wirelessnetworking, with support for more Wi-Fi chipsets and faster wirelessstandards, plus updated graphics drivers... The release announcement calls out the inclusion of OpenZFS2.4.0-rc4, OpenSSL3.5.4, and OpenSSH10.0 p2, and notes the inclusion of some new quantum-resistantencryption systems... In general, we found FreeBSD 15 easier and less complicated towork with than either of the previous major releases.It should be easier on servers too. The new OCI container supportin FreeBSD 14.2, which we wroteabout a year ago, is more mature now. FreeBSD has its own versionof Podman, and youcan runLinux containers on FreeBSD. This means you can use Dockercommands and tools, which are familiar to many more developersthan FreeBSD's native Jail system. "FreeBSD has its own place in servers and the public cloud, butit's getting easier to run it as a desktop OS as well," the article concludes. "It can run allthe main Linux desktops, including GNOME on Wayland." "There's nosystemd here, and never will be - and no Flatpak or Snap either,for that matter.

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