Steady in a shifting Open Source world: FreeBSD’s enduring stability
FreeBSD's new release cycle and extended support offer stability and predictability. Here's how to get involved.
Tux Machines
Do you waddle the waddle?
Do you waddle the waddle?
The MXM-ACMA-PUC is an industrial edge computing system from AAEON that combines 13th Generation Intel Core processors with an embedded Intel Arc GPU. It is designed for machine learning and AI workloads, with applications in smart city infrastructure and industrial workstation management.
Enter Rdsys: the next-generation bridge distribution system. Developed from the ground up, it incorporates the learnings from over 15 years of anti-censorship work to overcome the limitations of its predecessor. In October 2024, Tor completed the migration to Rdsys, retiring Bridge DB. This transition ensures a more flexible, maintainable, and user-friendly approach to bridge distribution, strengthening Tor's ability to counter censorship and making the web more accessible to those who need it most.
Released on September 15th, 2024, Linux kernel 6.11 introduced new features like a new driver subsystem to enable support upstream for Bluetooth/WLAN chips on Qualcomm platforms, getrandom() support to vDSO on x86 systems adding a new kind of mapping to mmap(2) that lets the kernel zero out pages anytime under memory pressure, and virtual CPU hotplug support for AArch64 (ARM64) ACPI systems.
Powered by Linux kernel 6.12 LTS and coming more than six months after Alpine Linux 3.20, the Alpine Linux 3.21 release introduces support for the latest GNOME 47, KDE Plasma 6.2, and LXQt 2.1 desktop environments, as well as initial support for the LoongArch64 architecture.
The Linux 4.19 kernel branch was released more than six years ago, on October 22nd, 2018, and it received no less than 325 maintenance updates, the last one being Linux 4.19.325. The biggest highlights of Linux kernel 4.19 were initial Wi-Fi 6 support, the EROFS file system, and a union mount filesystem implementation.
Linux kernel 6.12 was released on November 17th, 2024, and introduces new features like real-time “PREEMPT_RT” support, a new scheduler called sched_ext, and DRM panic messages as QR codes, as well as numerous new and updated drivers for better hardware support.
The NVIDIA 565.77 graphics driver is here more than three months after the NVIDIA 560 release and re-enables the GLX_EXT_buffer_age OpenGL extension on Xwayland, adds support for mmap of exported DMA-BUF objects, and adds several new per-plane and per-CRTC vendor-specific properties to nvidia-drm, which Wayland compositors can use to program the GPU’s color pipeline for HDR hardware acceleration.
For Debian GNU/Linux 13 “Trixie,” coming in the summer of 2025, the Debian Project held its usual artwork contest from September 2024 to mid-November 2024. The winner was announced today as “Ceratopsian” created by Elise Couper.
FreeBSD's new release cycle and extended support offer stability and predictability. Here's how to get involved.