FreeBSD 13.0 has been released

The FreeBSD Release Engineering team has released version 13.0 of the operating system. The release should bring performance improvements, among other things. Also, some outdated GNU tools have been removed.

It is the first release of FreeBSD’s stable 13 branch. The development team lists the changes made at release. For example, the lang, lld, and lldb utilities and compiler rt, llvm, libunwind, and libc++ libraries have been updated to version 11.0.1. In addition, some obsolete components have been removed, such as multiple drivers, the GNU debugger that was present for crash info, binutils 2.17 and gcc 4.2.1.

Also new is that there is in-kernel encryption for TLS 1.0 up to and including 1.3 and that the 64bit-Arm architecture has been given tier 1 status. FreeBSD 13.0 is available for amd64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpc64le, powerpcspe, armv6, armv7, aarch64, and riscv64. The software can be installed via bootable ISO images, networks or, for some architectures, via USB memory sticks. FreeBSD 12.0 was released in December 2018.