FreeBSD 14.0-RC2 Now Available

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 21, 2023

The second RC build of the 14.0-RELEASE release cycle is now available.


Installation images are available for:


o 14.0-RC2 amd64 GENERIC
o 14.0-RC2 i386 GENERIC
o 14.0-RC2 powerpc GENERIC
o 14.0-RC2 powerpc64 GENERIC64
o 14.0-RC2 powerpc64le GENERIC64LE
o 14.0-RC2 powerpcspe MPC85XXSPE
o 14.0-RC2 armv7 GENERICSD
o 14.0-RC2 aarch64 GENERIC
o 14.0-RC2 aarch64 RPI
o 14.0-RC2 aarch64 PINE64
o 14.0-RC2 aarch64 PINE64-LTS
o 14.0-RC2 aarch64 PINEBOOK
o 14.0-RC2 aarch64 ROCK64
o 14.0-RC2 aarch64 ROCKPRO64
o 14.0-RC2 riscv64 GENERIC
o 14.0-RC2 riscv64 GENERICSD


Note regarding arm SD card images: For convenience for those without
console access to the system, a freebsd user with a password of
freebsd is available by default for ssh(1) access.  Additionally,
the root user password is set to root.  It is strongly recommended
to change the password for both users after gaining access to the
system.


Installer images and memory stick images are available here:


    https://download.freebsd.org/releases/ISO-IMAGES/14.0/


The image checksums follow at the end of this e-mail.


If you notice problems you can report them through the Bugzilla PR
system or on the -stable mailing list.


If you would like to use Git to do a source based update of an existing
system, use the "releng/14.0" branch.


A summary of changes since 14.0-RC1 includes:


o OpenSSH has been updated to version 9.5p1.


o OpenSSL has been updated to version 3.0.11.


o Various VFS-related fixes.


o OpenZFS has been updated to zfs-2.2-release.


o Support for ZFS-backed Azure images has been implemented.


o A crash with smartpqi(4) or mpi3mr(4) devices has been resolved.


o An issue building virtual machine images for GCE has been resolved.


o And various other miscellaneous fixes.


A list of changes since 13.2-RELEASE is available in the releng/14.0
release notes:


    https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.0R/relnotes/


Please note, the release notes page is not yet complete, and will be
updated on an ongoing basis as the 14.0-RELEASE cycle progresses.


=== Virtual Machine Disk Images ===


VM disk images are available for the amd64, i386, and aarch64
architectures.  Disk images may be downloaded from the following URL
(or any of the FreeBSD download mirrors):


    https://download.freebsd.org/releases/VM-IMAGES/14.0-RC2/


BASIC-CI images can be found at:


    https://download.freebsd.org/releases/CI-IMAGES/14.0-RC2/


The partition layout is:


    ~ 16 kB - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label)
    ~ 1 GB  - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label)
    ~ 20 GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)


The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image
formats.  The image download size is approximately 135 MB and 165 MB
respectively (amd64/i386), decompressing to a 21 GB sparse image.


Note regarding arm64/aarch64 virtual machine images: a modified QEMU EFI
loader file is needed for qemu-system-aarch64 to be able to boot the
virtual machine images.  See this page for more information:


    https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64/QEMU


To boot the VM image, run:


    % qemu-system-aarch64 -m 4096M -cpu cortex-a57 -M virt  \
        -bios QEMU_EFI.fd -serial telnet::4444,server -nographic \
        -drive if=none,file=VMDISK,id=hd0 \
        -device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 \
        -device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0 \
        -netdev user,id=net0


Be sure to replace "VMDISK" with the path to the virtual machine image.

Read on