FreeBSD installation made easy: 14.1 brings cloud-init support

FreeBSD 14.1 is here: The most important change is that the free operating system can now be set up automatically with the established cloud-init.

(Image: iX)

Jun 6, 2024 at 3:10 pm CEST

3 min. read

iX Magazin

By

Michael Plura

This article was originally published in German and has been automatically translated.

To make FreeBSD easier to use in cloud environments, FreeBSD 14.1 now supports cloud-init. This is a widely used distribution method for the cross-platform initialization of cloud instances. It is supported by all major public cloud providers, frameworks for private cloud infrastructures and bare-metal installations.

When booting a cloud instance, cloud-init recognizes which cloud it is running in and initializes the operating system - in this case FreeBSD 14.1 – accordingly. The cloud-init client is not yet complete, but should already be suitable for test installations. There are simple cloud-init images for ZFS and UFS including a 1 MByte partition (config drive partition). When FreeBSD 14.1 is started for the first time, the script is executed via the firstboot mechanism to configure the cloud instance with networks, storage, SSH keys, packages and various other system aspects. The development work was sponsored by OVHcloud. FreeBSD 14.1 should already be automatically installable there and under OpenStack as a cloud instance on bare metal via "Bring Your Own Image".

FreeBSD C library with SIMD acceleration

Many string and memory operations in the C library now use SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) extensions to improve performance on amd64 systems. The FreeBSD manual pages under SIMD(7) show which functions are already supported by SIMD on which platform.

OpenZFS has been updated to version 2.2.4. When creating new UFS file systems with FreeBSD 14.1, soft updates are now enabled by default – previously the -U parameter was required. Soft updates can be disabled with tunefs(8). The NFS mount service, mountd(8), can decode directory names containing special characters or spaces using strunvis(3) as of FreeBSD 14.1.

PowerPC hardware and 100 Gbps E800 cards

Since version 12.2, FreeBSD includes ice(4), a driver for network cards with chips from the Intel E800 family, which also offers 100 Gbps support as of FreeBSD 14.1. The developers have also worked on the stability of the Intel Wi-Fi drivers. There have also been improvements in the audio area and now the option to remove devices asynchronously. This should simplify the use of USB headsets in particular and eliminate problems with sleep/awake on FreeBSD notebooks.

An implementation of fpu_kern_enter/fpu_kern_leave has been integrated for the PowerPC platform. This allows FPU, VSX and Altivec hardware extensions to be used in the kernel, which should speed up some crypto functions in particular.

The toolchain used by FreeBSD 14.1 is based on the Clang compiler in version 18.1.5, OpenSSH is available in version 9.7p1. The dtrace(1) tool (dynamic tracing compiler and tracing utility) can generate machine-readable JSON, XML and HTML via libxo(3) in addition to the standard output.

FreeBSD 14.1, along with the recently updated FreeBSD 13.3, is now available as a free download for many architectures from the FreeBSD project site.