MidnightBSD 2.0 Released: A FreeBSD-Derived OS For Desktop Users

Last month, we reported the major release of three operating systems: OpenBSD 6.8, NetBSD 9.1, and FreeBSD 12.2 from the BSD family. Now we have another massive release of yet another BSD (or say FreeBSD-derived) distribution called MidnightBSD 2.0.

It has imported several features from FreeBSD 11-STABLE branch and added base system improvements along with security updates and bug fixes.

MidnightBSD 2.0: What’s New?

Being derived from FreeBSD 11.x series, MidnightBSD 2.0 has updated its core components such as LLVM 8.0.1, ELF ToolChain r3614, OpenSSL 1.0.2u, parallel mounting support for ZFS, and Network firmware.

Besides the upstream changes, it has also updated other utilities to add new features. For instance, cpuset, sockstat, ipfw and ugidfw utilities to support jail names, last and lastlogin utility to support libxo, and fdisk utility to support sectors larger than 2048 bytes.

Additionally, the bhyve hypervisor now support virtio_console, AMD processors with SVM and AMD-V hardware extensions, and PS/2 scan codes for NumLock, ScrollLock, and numerical keypad keys.

For the security, version 2.0 has upgraded ping utility to use the Capsicum framework to drop privileges and protecting against malicious network packets.

Among the updated third-party software, it has also included new Perl 5.32.0, libarchive 3.4.2, zlib/1.2.11, Lua loader, Sqlite3 3.32.2, file 5.37, SVN 1.13.0, and pcap 1.9.0.

Here are the highlights of the other key enhancements that MidnightBSD 2.0 has added:

iwm driver imported from OpenBSD to support for Intel 3160/7260/7265 wireless chipsets
Support for Microsoft Hyper-V Generation 2 virtual machines
Addition of smartpqi driver to support Microsemi SCSI controllers
cm and fpa drivers marked as deprecated
Support for displaying VPD for PCI devices via pciconf
Fixed boot issues with Intel Apollo Lake CPUs

It’s also worth mentioning that after a day of version 2.0 release, the MidnightBSD team detected some issues with UEFI booting on amd64. Hence, the team has bumped the stable/2.0 branch to a new version 2.0.1 fixing the UEFI support.

For more information about other new features or upgrading MidnightBSD, you can read the release notes. If you want to install MidnightBSD 2.0 from scratch, ISO images are available to download for x86, amd64, and Virtual Machines.