FreeBSD 14.0 has been released with a host of new features and improvements

FreeBSD, the BSD-based operating system, has announced the release of version 14.0, marking over two and a half years of development since the last major update, FreeBSD 13.0.

One of the notable updates is the introduction of a new zfskeys rc service script. This allows for automatic decryption of ZFS datasets that are encrypted with ZFS native encryption during boot. The zfskeys startup script also supports autoloading of keys stored on ZFS.

The chroot facility now supports unprivileged operation, with the chroot program having a -n option to enable its use. In addition, md5sum and similar message-digest programs, compatible with those on Linux, were added. These are run with the -r option if the program name ends in sum.

FreeBSD 14.0 has enabled the use of FIDO/U2F hardware authenticators in ssh. This is achieved through the new public key types ecdsa-sk and ed25519-sk, along with corresponding certificate types.

The mgb network interface driver has been added to support Microchip devices LAN7430 PCIe Gigabit Ethernet controller with PHY and LAN7431 PCIe Gigabit Ethernet controller with RGMII interface. Despite some caveats and limitations, the driver is functional.

The software also builds two new daemons, rpc.tlsclntd and rpc.tlsservd, by default on amd64 and arm64. These daemons provide support for NFS-over-TLS.

Improvements have been made to UEFI firmware boot compatibility for amd64, and boot time performance has been enhanced for many kernel subsystems. The handling of nvme errors has also seen significant improvements.

FreeBSD 14.0 also brings a host of other new features, improvements, and bug fixes, further enhancing the capabilities of this BSD-based operating system.