Download FreeBSD 10.3

Members of the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team have released the third update for version 10 of FreeBSD. FreeBSD was created in 1993 and is developed as a whole, unlike, say, Linux, whose kernel is maintained by one group of developers and certain applications by others. Because of this, FreeBSD is generally considered more stable and robust than several other operating systems. Extensive release notes can be found on this page are found, these are briefly the most important changes:

Some of the highlights:

• The UEFI boot loader received several improvements: It now follows /boot/config and /boot.config files, multi-device boot support works and command line arguments are parsed. Additionally, its framebuffer driver has been enhanced with GOP (Graphics Output Protocol) and UGA (Universal Graphics Adapter) handling, allowing to set the current graphics mode on systems using one of these methods. Moreover, ZFS boot capability has been added to the UEFI boot loader, including support for multiple ZFS Boot Environments (BEs), eg those provided by sysutils/beadm.
• The CAM Target Layer ctl(4) now supports High Availability setups.
• The Linux compatibility layer has been substantially improved and now is capable of running 64-bit applications on amd64 (x86_64), 1:1 threading, VDSO and subset of the epoll(7) family sufficient for the majority of programs.
• The em(4) and igb(4) drivers have been updated to version 7.6.1 and 2.5.3 respectively. Among others, this brings support for i219/i219(2)/i219(3) hardware found with Intel® Skylake generation and newer chipsets.
• The isp(4) driver has been updated and improved: It now also supports 16 Gbps Fiber Channel adapters, has improved target mode support and completed Multi-ID (NPIV) functionality.
• The ixgbe(4) driver has been updated to Intel® FreeBSD Networking Group version 3.1.13-k and support for X552 and X550T was added.
• The initial implementation of reroot support has has been added to the reboot(8) utility, allowing the root file system to be mounted from a temporary source file system without requiring a full system reboot.
• The bsdinstall(8) utility has been updated to allow for creating root-on-ZFS installations on UEFI-based systems in automatic mode.
• The ifconfig(8) utility now reports SFP/SFP+ optics module data when the -v flag is specified and a NIC driver provides such information, ie for cxgbe(4), ixgbe(4), mlx5en(4) and sfxge(4) .
• The jail(8) utility has been updated to include a new flag, -l, which ensures a clean environment in the target jail. Additionally, jail(8) now runs a shell within the target jail by default when no command was given.
• The mkimg(1) utility has been updated to support NTFS file systems in both GPT and MBR partitioning schemes.
• The xz(1) utility has been updated to version 5.2.2, which provides support for multi-threaded compression.
• GNOME has been updated to version 3.16.2.
• TeXLive has been updated to TL2015.
• Xorg Server has been updated to version 1.17.4.
• And much more…

For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list, available at: