MidnightBSD Developer Journal

MidnightBSD 0.4 has been released on July 5, 2013. It includes many new features, but

of particular interest is the new package management tool, mport.  

 

This release is a bit different from previous releases in that we plan to update

packages during the support period for 0.4. Rather than upload packages and

sit on them for the life of the release, you will be able to download updated

packages for i386 and amd64 periodically. 

 

Due to this new feature, our initial package offering is smaller than we've done

for previous releases as many things had to get migrated and updated. We plan

to expand the packages available in the coming weeks. 

 

In addition to mport, we've imported a large number of features from FreeBSD 9.1

including ZFS with ZPOOL 28/dedup support, LLVM + CLANG in base, migration to GPT

as the default in the installer, bsdinstall, BSD licensed sort and grep,

cpucontrol(8), and UFS2 + SUJ (journaling). We've also imported the newer FreeBSD

USB stack, NFSv4 client, syscons, and CAM based ATA. 

 

Support for newer hardware includes Intel Sandybridge and Ivy Bridge graphics,

various wifi chipsets, updates to Intel and Realtek ethernet adapters, and acpi.

 

The default system compiler is still GCC 4.2, but it has been updated to a newer release.

We also removed libobjc from base as it was GCC specific and we want to migrate to

libobjc2.  We offer libobjc2 in mports and it will work with GCC and LLVM. 

 

MidnightBSD now has it's own GPT partition types and offers a new search command,

msearch.

 

libc gains strnlen(3), memrchr(3), stpncpy(3).

 

We've also imported and updated many third party libraries:

 

bzip2 version 1.0.6

Diffutils 3.2

FILE 5.05

OpenSSH 5.8p2

SQLite 3.7.15.2

MKSH R44

NetBSD's iconv

BIND 9.8

tcsh 6.18.01

Perl 5.14.2

mDNSResponder 333.10

less v436

libarchive 3.0.3

libdialog (lgpl version)

libffi 3.0.10

wide-dhcpv6

openresolv

sendmail 8.14.5

sudo 1.7.4-p6

tzdata_2012j

 

This release is a bit disruptive due to the number of changes, but it was decided

to move forward with it due to the age of 0.3-RELEASE.  The next release is planned