FreeBSD 10.3 ISO images are also available for download

Apr 4, 2016 01:43 GMT  ·  By

Today, April 4, 2016, the FreeBSD project proudly announced the official release and general availability of the FreeBSD 10.3 operating system powered by a BSD kernel.

While not a GNU/Linux distribution, FreeBSD is an important open source project and one of the widely used BSD operating systems, and today's announcement proves just that. However, the FreeBSD 10.3 release was made available to download last week.

According to the release notes, FreeBSD 10.3 comes with dozens of enhancements and new features, starting with improvements to the Linux compatibility layer, allowing users to run 64-bit applications on amd64 (x86_64) hardware.

The UEFI bootloader received many improvements as well, such as better multi-deviec support, UGA (Universal Graphics Adapter) and GOP (Graphics Output Protocol) handling in the framebuffer driver, and ZFS boot capability.

High Availability setups are now supported in the CAM Target Layer, Intel Skylake and newer chipsets are now fully supported, 16 Gbps Fibre Channel adapters support has been added as well, along with full Multi-ID (NPIV) functionality. Moreover, it is now possible to create root-on-ZFS installations on UEFI-based systems.

XZ comes with multi-threaded compression

Intel FreeBSD Networking Group version 3.1.13-k is now supported in the ixgbe driver, along with support for X552 and X550T, and initial reroot implementation was added in the reboot utility, allowing users to mount a rootfs from a temporary source file system without the need to reboot the OS.

NTFS filesystems are now supported in the mkimg utility for both MBR and GPT partitioning schemes, support for multi-threaded compression was added to the xz archiver, and software projects like GNOME 3.16.2, TeXLive 2015, and X.Org Server 1.17.4 are also present.

Download FreeBSD 10.3 right now from our website.