14 DAY TRIAL // The DragonFly BSD developers announced today the release and immediate availability for download of version 5.2 of their FreeBSD-based open source Unix-like operating system.
Packed with mitigations for the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities unearthed earlier this year and discovered to put billions of devices at risk of attacks, DragonFly BSD 5.2 is here to make sure you're running a secure and safe Unix-like operating system on your personal computer or server.
"Meltdown isolation and Spectre mitigation support added. Meltdown mitigation is automatically enabled for all Intel CPUs. Spectre mitigation must be enabled manually via sysctl if desired, using sysctls machdep.spectre_mitigation and machdep.meltdown_mitigation," said the devs.
HAMMER2 improvements, IPFW updates, faster graphics acceleration
In addition to the Meltdown and Spectre mitigations, DragonFly BSD 5.2 adds significant improvements to the HAMMER2 filesystem for a performance boost, though clustered support isn't yet available. However, the DragonFly BSD developers recommend using HAMMER2 as default root filesystem in non-clustered mode.
Graphics support has been dramatically improved in DragonFly BSD 5.2 as well, thanks to the updates to the open source Intel i915 OpenGL graphics driver that brought support for Intel Coffee Lake processors, support for the 24-bit pixel format on the EFI frame buffer code, as well as better fbio support for the "scfb" X.Org driver.
The latter allows X.Org Server to use EFI frame buffers in DragonFly BSD when there's no GPU support present. Other than that, this release improves display power saving by partly implementing the FBIO_BLANK ioctl and instructs the syscons console driver to wait for DRM ModeSetting to avoid races.
IPFW, FreeBSD's stateful firewall, was updated as well in DragonFly BSD 5.2 with support for all possible ICMP types, better support for ICMP_MAXTYPE assumptions, and a state-based "redirect" implementation that no longer requires libalias. The full changelog can be found in the release announcement.