The FreeBSD developers remain very busy and some of their Q3-2024 accomplishments include:
- The FreeBSD release team has decided to reduce the support timeline from five to four years. After the four year period of FreeBSD release support, there will be a "best effort" support attempt.
- AMD's collaboration with the FreeBSD Foundation continues. One of the ongoing joint AMD + FreeBSD projects is to develop an AMD IOMMU driver for the platform. This AMD IOMMU driver is nearing completion and testing is ongoing with AMD large-core-count servers.
- As part of the collaboration between the FreeBSD Foundation and Quantum Leap Research for improving FreeBSD laptop support , the Intel and AMD graphics drivers are seeing updates. There is also ongoing work for better WiFi support, enhancing power management, audio improvements, and other laptop hardware feature work.
- FreeBSD 14.2 release preparations are underway with FreeBSD 14.2 Beta 1 recently debuting. They hope to issue FreeBSD 14.2-RELEASE around early December.
- The FreeBSD audio mixer has implemented hot-swapping, there is now a sound dummy driver, and other sound support work.
- Changes are being made to dhclient to speed-up the FreeBSD boot process. Google sponsored this work via GSOC to "boot significantly faster" for the OS -- about two seconds.
- A project started to bring FreeBSD to the PinePhone Pro.
- AArch64 SIMD enhancements are being made for better performance on ARM.
The report in full can be read over on FreeBSD.org .