• FreeBSD 11.0 RC3 Released, OS Still Trying To Get Out This Month

  The third release candidate to FreeBSD 11.0 is now available with this release cycle running now a few weeks behind schedule

• FreeBSD 11.0-RC3 Now Available

Following the seven-way Linux distribution benchmark comparison published earlier this week, on the same system I set out to test a variety of BSD distributions on the same system and ultimately benchmark their out-of-the-box performance too. Those performance benchmark results will be published later this week while today were a few remarks I wanted to share when trying out TrueOS, DragonFlyBSD, GhostBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, MidnightBSD, and PacBSD (Arch BSD) on this modern Intel Xeon system.

All of my testing was done on an Intel Xeon E5-2509 v4 Broadwell-EP system with MSI X99A WORKSTATION motherboard, NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN X, 16GB of DDR4 memory, and an OCZ TRION 150 120GB SATA 3.0 SSD. With the seven Linux distributions tested in recent days they all worked fine on the system: Ubuntu, Clear Linux, Scientific Linux, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Fedora, Antergos, and Sabayon Linux.

Below are my various brief remarks when testing the different BSDs on this Intel Xeon system. These are my thoughts with admittedly being a Linux enthusiast while just touching BSD, Solaris, and others only on a semi-frequent basis. I am by no means a diehard "Linux fan boy" and have no fundamental objections to BSD, I simply prefer the operating system that best fits my needs and for benchmarking where I can get my tests done in a reliable, reproducible, and timely manner. I at least prefer my operating systems have a clean and quick install process with sane defaults; working generally ~100 hour weeks, I don't have time in 2016 if an OS cannot easily install and boot properly on a modern PC. I enjoy testing out the various BSDs and have no strong bias to any of them. This is the largest BSD testing comparison I've done in the past 12 years on Phoronix at the same time and on the same hardware.

• Revisiting W^X with OpenBSD 6.0

  OpenBSD 6.0 was released today, and with it some exciting new security features. From my perspective, the chief among them is the technical enforcement of W^X in user-land. Since moving to a technical control rather than a policy statement for enforcing executable space protection was a result of discussions caused by my last blog post on the situation, I’m very excited about this development and thought that giving a demonstration and discussion would be in order. (In the spirit of not putting the headline on Page 1 and the retraction on Page 11, hopefully BSDNow will cover this as well).

• OpenBSD 6.0 : why and how

  The only operating system I use on my computers is not Mac, not Windows, and not even Linux. It's OpenBSD, and I love it so much.

  Since OpenBSD 6.0 was released today, I figured I should say a little something about why I love it, and how you can try it.

• PC-BSD Evolves into TrueOS

  We are proud to announce that the PC-BSD project has evolved into TrueOS: a modern, cutting-edge distribution of FreeBSD focused on security, simplicity, and stability for desktops, servers, and beyond! TrueOS harnesses the best elements of PC-BSD, combines it with security technologies from OpenBSD, and layers it on top of FreeBSD to provide a complete system for modern machines.

Ken Moore, developer of the PC-BSD operating system for personal computers and creator of the Lumina Desktop Environment project, informed the community today, September 1, 2016, about a major change in the development of the OS.

Also: PC-BSD-Renamed TrueOS To Use LibreSSL, Linux DRM 4.7 Compatibility

OpenBSD 6.0 Operating System Adds Support for ARMv7 Architectures, OpenSSH 7.3