Among the Q4'2023 highlights for the FreeBSD project included:
- FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE making it out in November.
- The FreeBSD Foundation sponsored work on SIMD enhancements for AMD64 (x86_64). In particular, the work focused on SIMD implementations of more than one dozen C library (libc) functions with scalar implementations as well as making use of SSE... Yes, an x86-64-v2 target while initially I was hoping they were catering to AVX(2) or AVX-512 for modern hardware. But these SIMD libc improvements set the stage for x86-64-v3/x86-64-v4 optimizations in the future. Even with the current SIMD work they found the performance improved by a factor of 5.54x on average.
There is more information on this FreeBSD SIMD AMD64 work via the FreeBSD Foundation Blog . This work is currently staged for FreeBSD 15 but will be back-ported for FreeBSD 14.1.
- A Zenbleed fix for AMD Zen 2 processors.
- The FreeBSD Infrastructure team began a $100,000 cluster refresh for CI servers, web servers, package builders, and more.
- Many kernel updates for device drivers, file-systems, and various other subsystems / features.
- More progress on Microsoft Hyper-V and Azure support as well as for Amazon EC2 / AWS.
- Continued progress on updating the GCC default compiler version to GCC 13.
More details on the Q4'2023 FreeBSD achievements via the FreeBSD.org status report .