• DragonFlyBSD Picks Up Radeon Performance Improvements With Latest Code Update

  Slipping just past this week's DragonFlyBSD 5.6 release is now an early feature for the next series: continued work on the Radeon DRM driver ported to this BSD from the Linux kernel.

• ZFS vs. OpenZFS

  You’ve probably heard us say a mix of “ZFS” and “OpenZFS” and an explanation is long-overdue. Our Senior Analyst clears up what ZFS and OpenZFS refer to and how they differ.

• 8 Popular Products You Didn't Know Were Built with Open Source

  A popular streaming service, video games consoles, and mobile messaging all owe a debt to FreeBSD.

The second RC build of the 11.3-RELEASE release cycle is now available.

Installation images are available for:

o 11.3-RC2 amd64 GENERIC
o 11.3-RC2 i386 GENERIC
o 11.3-RC2 powerpc GENERIC
o 11.3-RC2 powerpc64 GENERIC64
o 11.3-RC2 sparc64 GENERIC
o 11.3-RC2 armv6 BANANAPI
o 11.3-RC2 armv6 BEAGLEBONE
o 11.3-RC2 armv6 CUBIEBOARD
o 11.3-RC2 armv6 CUBIEBOARD2
o 11.3-RC2 armv6 CUBOX-HUMMINGBOARD
o 11.3-RC2 armv6 RPI-B
o 11.3-RC2 armv6 RPI2
o 11.3-RC2 armv6 PANDABOARD
o 11.3-RC2 armv6 WANDBOARD
o 11.3-RC2 aarch64 GENERIC

Note regarding arm SD card images: For convenience for those without
console access to the system, a freebsd user with a password of
freebsd is available by default for ssh(1) access.  Additionally,
the root user password is set to root.  It is strongly recommended
to change the password for both users after gaining access to the
system.

Installer images and memory stick images are available here:

    https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/ISO-IMAGES/11.3/

The image checksums follow at the end of this e-mail.

If you notice problems you can report them through the Bugzilla PR
system or on the -stable mailing list.

If you would like to use SVN to do a source based update of an existing
system, use the "releng/11.3" branch.

A summary of changes since 11.3-RC1 includes:

o Updates to the ixl(4) and ixlv(4) drivers.

A list of changes since 11.2-RELEASE is available in the releng/11.3
release notes:

    https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.3R/relnotes.html

Please note, the release notes page is not yet complete, and will be
updated on an ongoing basis as the 11.3-RELEASE cycle progresses.

=== Virtual Machine Disk Images ===

VM disk images are available for the amd64, i386, and aarch64
architectures.  Disk images may be downloaded from the following URL
(or any of the FreeBSD download mirrors):

    https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/VM-IMAGES/11.3-RC2/

The partition layout is:

    ~ 16 kB - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label)
    ~ 1 GB  - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label)
    ~ 20 GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)

The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image
formats.  The image download size is approximately 135 MB and 165 MB
respectively (amd64/i386), decompressing to a 21 GB sparse image.

Note regarding arm64/aarch64 virtual machine images: a modified QEMU EFI
loader file is needed for qemu-system-aarch64 to be able to boot the
virtual machine images.  See this page for more information:

    https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64/QEMU

To boot the VM image, run:

    % qemu-system-aarch64 -m 4096M -cpu cortex-a57 -M virt  \
	-bios QEMU_EFI.fd -serial telnet::4444,server -nographic \
	-drive if=none,file=VMDISK,id=hd0 \
	-device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 \
	-device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0 \
	-netdev user,id=net0

Be sure to replace "VMDISK" with the path to the virtual machine image.

=== Amazon EC2 AMI Images ===

FreeBSD/amd64 EC2 AMIs are available in the following regions:

  eu-north-1 region: ami-091a9d377d956c519
  ap-south-1 region: ami-0fa381eb7dd65b236
  eu-west-3 region: ami-0888c48fcbc7ec3b9
  eu-west-2 region: ami-01d9ee1b7ba0aaf87
  eu-west-1 region: ami-072313e0a896f9fc3
  ap-northeast-2 region: ami-081a9854f2575823e
  ap-northeast-1 region: ami-027ab7629095b2419
  sa-east-1 region: ami-0ed1e9346b072b7fa
  ca-central-1 region: ami-0effcf973bbde0b80
  ap-southeast-1 region: ami-06fc8fd0e39f4a6e8
  ap-southeast-2 region: ami-0e68f9d80df9828aa
  eu-central-1 region: ami-042016143d5bf5261
  us-east-1 region: ami-0ad4a06d874497067
  us-east-2 region: ami-0efb20b4a888c1bd1
  us-west-1 region: ami-0b5b96c925cec68fe
  us-west-2 region: ami-0f672651aa001cc97

=== Vagrant Images ===

FreeBSD/amd64 images are available on the Hashicorp Atlas site, and can
be installed by running:

    % vagrant init freebsd/FreeBSD-11.3-RC2
    % vagrant up

=== Upgrading ===

The freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of amd64 and i386
systems running earlier FreeBSD releases.  Systems running earlier
FreeBSD releases can upgrade as follows:

	# freebsd-update upgrade -r 11.3-RC2

During this process, freebsd-update(8) may ask the user to help by
merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automatically
performed merging was done correctly.

	# freebsd-update install

The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before
continuing.

	# shutdown -r now

After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new
userland components:

	# freebsd-update install

It is recommended to rebuild and install all applications if possible,
especially if upgrading from an earlier FreeBSD release, for example,
FreeBSD 11.x.  Alternatively, the user can install misc/compat11x and
other compatibility libraries, afterwards the system must be rebooted
into the new userland:

	# shutdown -r now

Finally, after rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to remove
stale files:

	# freebsd-update install

• DragonFly BSD 5.6

  DragonFly version 5.6 brings an improved virtual memory system, updates to radeon and ttm, and performance improvements for HAMMER2.

  The details of all commits between the 5.4 and 5.6 branches are available in the associated commit messages for 5.6.0rc1 and 5.6.0.

• DragonFlyBSD 5.6 Released With VM System, HAMMER2 In Good Shape

  DragonFlyBSD 5.6 is now available as the latest major update to this popular BSD operating system.

  DragonFlyBSD 5.6 brings the HAMMER2 file-system by default following numerous improvements this cycle to HAMMER2 to put it now in comparable/better standing than HAMMER1. HAMMER1 though remains available for those interested. I'll have out some new HAMMER2 DragonFlyBSD benchmarks shortly.

The first RC build of the 11.3-RELEASE release cycle is now available.

Also: FreeBSD 11.3 Release Candidate Brings Different Fixes