14 DAY TRIAL // Marius Strobl was happy to inform all fans of the FreeBSD operating system that they can now test drive the second Beta build of the upcoming FreeBSD 10.3 release, which should hit the streets in late March 2016.
Noteworthy changes since the first Beta build of the upcoming FreeBSD 10.3 operating system include OpenSSH 7.1p2, updated UEFI ZFS loader to support the latest ZFS Boot Environment loader menu features, SIOCGI2C IOCTL support in the sfxge(4) driver, which should allow for querying of QSFP+ and SFP+ module information.
The NTP daemon now includes a leap-seconds file by default, for which the rc(8) and ntpd.conf(5) configuration files have been updated, which can be updated via periodic(8). Moreover, the random(9) initialization has been tweaked a little in this release, fixing the "random device not loaded; using insecure entropy" error.
Another interesting change is the update of the ixgbe(4) driver to support the X550T, X552, and Intel FreeBSD Networking Group 3.1.13-k, as well as to improve the SFP module insertion post boot, wrong reporting of unsupported flow control auto-negotiation, Amazon Cloud's VF handling of VLANs, and PHY and GBIC power setup.
Furthermore, it is now possible to configure the link speed negotiation and flow defaults through the hw.ix.advertise_speed and hw.ix.flow_control loader tunables respectively. The FreeBSD 10.3 Beta 2 release also patches a leak of routing table allocations, which occurred when attempting to shutdown VNET-enabled jails.
The UEFI bootloader received various enhancements
Among other interesting changes, the second Beta build of FreeBSD 10.3 adds various enhancements to the UEFI bootloader, such as the adhering of the /boot.config and /boot/config files, support for booting multiple devices, as well as command-line argument parsing.
Last but not least, there's a fix for a bug discovered in bsnmpd(1), which caused breakage on systems that had severe alignment requirements, the prohibition of opening callout devices by the tty(4) layer when the respective callin device is open, and corruption of coredumps fixes.
The development cycle of FreeBSD 10.3 will continue with a third Beta release next week, a first RC (Release Candidate) build at the end of February 2016, a second RC version in the first week of March, and a third Release Candidate in mid-March. Download FreeBSD 10.3 Beta 2 right now via Softpedia.