FreeBSD 13.4 is about to be released with modernized DVD package set and driver updates

FreeBSD 13.4-RC1 was released ahead of the planned official release in early September. While the FreeBSD 14 series offers the latest and greatest releases, FreeBSD 13.4 is a nice incremental update for those still on a FreeBSD 13 base.

FreeBSD 13.4 brings a number of minor updates to the operating system. There are several driver updates, such as the Intel ICE Ethernet network driver and IRDRMA driver. The LLVM/Clang compiler has been updated to LLVM 18.1.5, and there are also a number of other package updates, such as SQLite 3.46 and OpenSSH 9.7p1. The FreeBSD 13.4 release notes, which are currently in progress, can be found on FreeBSD.org.

For today's weekly development release of FreeBSD 13.4-RC1, there is now a modernized set of packages on the DVD ISOs, a crash fix for tail -F, fixes for per-user ZFS record management within the adduser command, and other fixes.

The package modernization on the FreeBSD 13.4 DVD images includes adding seatd, the Sway compositor, and other packages, while removing the xf86-video-vmware driver and other old packages, applying the same package modernization work that was done for FreeBSD 14.1.

FreeBSD 13.4-RELEASE is expected to be released around September 3rd.