FreeBSD 14.2: Installer finally loads firmware, OCI images for the cloud

The streamlined release engineering process in FreeBSD 14.1, along with the new FreeBSD 14.2 OCI images, makes FreeBSD more attractive for commercial use. Notebook users will enjoy the long-awaited automatic firmware downloads during installation.

Until now, one of the biggest hurdles when installing FreeBSD was the handling of firmware blobs, for example for WLAN or graphics cards. The developers have now finally added functions to the installer that take over this tedious task after the installation of the base system (e.g. via USB stick). Firmware files are downloaded and installed automatically from FreeBSD 14.2 onwards.

In our tests on various ThinkPads and a Huawei notebook, this worked excellently (and almost always). Only when selecting additional firmware was there sometimes a jumble of letters on the screen instead of a selection list of firmware blobs – but the developers should be able to fix this quickly. As with many Linux distributions or OpenBSD (fw-update), the automatic installation of partly non-open source firmware is unattractive, but necessary in practice, for example to access the network via WLAN.

FreeBSD 14.2 fit for the cloud

Together with Colin Percival, who took over FreeBSD release engineering at the end of last year, the entire release engineering process has been made easier to plan, especially for commercial use, thanks to new fixed release schedules and the new OCI images.

Thanks to an optimized sorting algorithm, the AMD64 and ARM64 FreeBSD kernels start in the MicroVMs of Amazon Web Services (AWS FaaS "Lambda" with Firecracker hypervisor) in around 25 milliseconds and are therefore three times faster than Linux. Together with the OCI images now available, FreeBSD 14.2 can be rolled out in the cloud at lightning speed. The images according to the Open Container Initiative standard can currently be found in a special directory in three variants for aarch64, amd64, i386 and riscv64: They are available dynamically or statically linked and as a shell-based image (minimal) including pkg-bootstrap, which can be used to conveniently install additional packages. The oci-playground on Github demonstrates the practical use of OCI containers.

The Open Container Initiative (OCI) dates back to 2015, was launched by Docker and CoreOS, among others, and represents an industry standard for virtualized systems at operating system level. Attention, risk of confusion: The previous OCI images, which have been available since FreeBSD 13.1, are intended for the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (also OCI as an abbreviation).

Innovations and changes under the hood

Many open source components have been brought up to date in FreeBSD 14.2. The compiler suite around llvm, clang, compiler-rt, libc++, libunwind, lld, lldb and openmp has been updated to version 18.1.6, OpenSSl is available as 3.0.15 and OpenZFS as 2.2.6.

NVMe disks can now be administered on all platforms using nvme(4) and nvmecontrol(8). Those who use fdisk(8) for partitioning disks, which is still known from the good old DOS days, now get a discreet hint that it has been marked as "deprecated" and will be removed for good with FreeBSD 15 in favor of gpart(8). The first bug that has already been documented is the rare case of a FreeBSD 14.1 self-compiled kernel driver for AMD and Intel GPUs (drm-kmod) causing text mode to stop working in FreeBSD 14.2.

FreeBSD 14.2, which is released under the free BSD license, is now available free of charge for various hardware platforms via the project page.

(mho)