FreeBSD 14.4 brings new tweaks, fixes, and updated packages

FreeBSD 14.4 is now available for a wide range of architectures, and, fortunately for those still hanging on to old-school i386 hardware, this new release continues to support it. The other architectures supported are amd64, aarch64, armv7, powerpc, powerpc64, and riscv64. This point release will be supported until the end of 2026. On the other hand, FreeBSD 14.3 will reach its EOL on June 30. 

Without further ado, these are the highlights of the fifth release belonging to the stable/14 branch:

• Manual page tooling and content received significant improvements.
• OpenZFS got updated to version 2.2.9.
• OpenSSH now uses the hybrid post-quantum algorithm mlkem768x25519-sha256 by default and was upgraded to version 10.0p2.
• Cloud-init compatibility in nuageinit has been significantly improved.
• The new p9fs is used by Bhyve virtual machines to share a filesystem with the host.
• The in-kernel MIDI sequencer is now deprecated.
• Improper handling of files that exceed 4 GB and 8 GB limits by the tarfs filesystem has been fixed.

The comprehensive list of changes in FreeBSD 14.4 can be found on this page.

To upgrade from previous RELEASE versions (like this one), users can take advantage of the frebsd-update utility. More details on the process can be found here. Obviously, new users or those who choose to go with a setup from scratch can grab one of the many image files available, depending on the platform and media they are planning to use.