The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) provides boot- and
run-time services for x86 and other computers. For the x86 architecture
it replaces the legacy BIOS. This project will adapt the FreeBSD loader
and kernel boot process for compatibility with UEFI firmware, found on
contemporary servers, desktops, and laptops.

Ed and Nathan completed a number of integration tasks over the past
three months. Nathan added a first-stage loader, boot1.efi, to support
chain-loading the rest of the system from a UFS filesystem. This allows
the UEFI boot process to proceed in a similar fashion as with BIOS
boot. Nathan also added UEFI support to the FreeBSD installer and
release image creation script.

The EFI framebuffer requires the vt(4) system console -- a framebuffer
driver is not implemented for the legacy syscons(4) console. Ed added
automatic vt(4) selection to the UEFI boot path.

Snapshots are now built as dual-mode images, and should boot via both
BIOS and UEFI. Our plan is to merge the UEFI and vt(4) work to
stable/10 to appear in FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE.

This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.

After more than a half-year in development and working on tens of thousands of lines of code, Pkg 1.3.0 has been released by FreeBSD developers.

Pkg 1.3.0 introduces a new solver to automatically handle conflicts and dynamically discover them, pkg install can now install local files and resolve their dependencies via remote repositories, sandboxing of the code has happened, improved portability of the code took place, the pkg API has been simplified, improvements to the multi-repository mode, and a ton of other changes and fixes took place.

More on the pkg 1.3.0 release for improved package management on FreeBSD can be found via this mailing list post.

The final version of FreeBSD 9.3, an operating system for x86, ARM, IA-64, PowerPC, PC-98, and UltraSPARC architectures, has been released and is now available for download.

The GhostBSD team is pleased to announce the availability the third BETA build of the 4.0-RELEASE release cycle is available on SourceForge for the amd64 and i386 architectures. This is expected to be the final BETA build of the 4.0-RELEASE cycle.

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE. This is the fourth release of the stable/9 branch, which improves on the stability of FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE and introduces some new features.

JabirOS, the distribution formerly powered by Ubuntu that changed to a FreeBSD base and then proclaimed itself an independent FreeBSD fork, is trying to invent its own user-interface.

Muhammadreza Haghiri of the Jabir Project wrote into Phoronix today to share news about their Cadmium UI, a new HTML5 GUI they're trying to use for their BSD-forked operating system. Their new Cadmium UI is written using HTML5 with CSS3 and JavaScript while depending upon the Impress.js library. This HTML5 GUI integrates with the Duck Duck Go search engine and rollApp. Some details on Cadmium UI can be found via the project's blog.

A Linux kernel developer is working on porting FreeBSD's CAPSICUM security framework over to the Linux kernel.

In announcing his work at the end of June that's now being discussed amongst kernel stakeholders, David Drysdale wrote, "The last couple of versions of FreeBSD (9.x/10.x) have included the Capsicum security framework, which allows security-aware applications to sandbox themselves in a very fine-grained way. For example, OpenSSH now uses Capsicum in its FreeBSD version to restrict sshd's credentials checking process, to reduce the chances of credential leakage. It would be good to have equivalent functionality in Linux, so I've been working on getting the Capsicum framework running in the kernel, and I'd appreciate some feedback/opinions on the general design approach."

The third RC build of the 9.3-RELEASE release cycle is now available
on the FTP servers for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and
sparc64 architectures.

This is expected to be the final RC build of the 9.3-RELEASE cycle.

We are pleased to announce today, July 4, that the Ubuntu MATE Remix 14.04 has reached Alpha stage and is available for download as Live DVD/USB images that can be installed.

Ubuntu MATE Remix 14.04 Alpha comes as a July 4 surprise to many who believed the controversial project would become reality sooner or later. It beautifully integrates the MATE desktop environment into the latest upstream Ubuntu release.

The distribution was developed by a few members of the Ubuntu community and provides users with an old-school graphical desktop environment, which reminds us of the good ol’ times of Ubuntu 10.04.

The second Release Candidate of FreeBSD 9.3, an operating system for x86, ARM, IA-64, PowerPC, PC-98, and UltraSPARC architectures, is now available for download and testing.

GhostBSD 4.0 continues moving along as the FreeBSD operating system focused around the MATE Desktop Environment.

GhostBSD 4.0 Beta 2 was released and it features various bug-fixes and other minor improvements over the earlier development versions.

The PC-BSD team is pleased to announce the availability of the next PC-BSD quarterly update, version 10.0.2!

The first RC build of the 9.3-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures.

If you've been following along with our earlier articles on next-gen filesystems like btrfs and zfs, but wanted an easy way to get started without having to learn anything on the command line (or need an easy way to take advantage even though you're a Windows-only user), you're in luck. Today, we're going to look at two ready-to-rock ZFS-enabled network attached storage distributions: FreeNAS and NAS4Free.

This will (hopefully) be our last RC before releasing 10.0.2 officially sometime on or around the 23rd. We have addressed or fixed most tickets related to the 10.0.2 release, so if you are still running into any issues, please report them using our Trac database.

For some tests the performance doesn't deviate much between Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD given that both have a similar user-land. For our many source-based computational tests, the main factor to point out is that both GNU/Linux and GNU/kFreeBSD versions of 7.5 Wheezy have GCC 4.7 while the latest testing versions of these open-source operating systems are using the GCC 4.8 stable series.

Both Linux and the BSDs are free and open-source, Unix-like operating systems. They even use much of the same software — these operating systems have more things in common than they do differences. So why do they all exist?

There are more differences than we can cover here, especially philosophical differences about the way one should build an operating system and license it. This should help you understand the basics, though.

The third BETA build of the 9.3-RELEASE release cycle is now available
on the FTP servers for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and
sparc64 architectures.

This is expected to be the final -BETA build of the 9.3-RELEASE cycle.

The image checksums follow at the end of this email.

ISO images and, for architectures that support it, the memory stick images
are available here:

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/ISO-IMAGES/9.3/

DragonFly, a distribution that belongs to the same class of operating systems as other BSD-derived systems and UNIX, has reached version 3.8.

DragonFly 3.8 is not as big as the previous release, but there are some very important features that have been added by the developers and it really warrants an update if you have an older version of this distro.

“DragonFly binaries in /bin and /sbin are now dynamic, which makes it possible to use current identification and authentication technologies such as PAM and NSS to manage user accounts. Some libraries have been moved to /lib to support this.”

The latest Linux 3.16 kernel pull request worth covering on Phoronix are the latest LLVMLinux patches for being able to compile the kernel with Clang rather than GCC.

With Linux 3.15 came the patch-set to come close to being able to compile under Clang and now with Linux 3.16 it's a bit closer. A set of five LLVMLinux patches are called for merging that affect ARM and Shash Crypto code.