FreeBSD 14.0 Release Information
freebsd.org
freebsd.org
Random comments:
> The base64(1) utility has been added.
I know I will forget about this and keep using a Python REPL.
> RSA/SHA-1 signatures are now disabled by default in ssh(1).
> The X11Forwarding option also defaults to no.
Much appreciated.
> [Cloud Support]
Nice to hear, but unfortunately I get the impression that bus factor is 1 for the maintenance of these releases, so I stopped using FreeBSD in AWS just out of an abundance of caution.
> OpenZFS has been upgraded to version 2.2. New features include:
> block cloning, which allows shallow copies of blocks in file copies. This is optional, and disabled by default; [...]
This sounds interesting, but I wonder what would be the advantages compared to enabling dedup on a specific dataset (disclaimer: I've never used dedup).
> FreeBSD 15.0 is not expected to include support for 32-bit platforms other than armv7.
This doesn't currently affect me, but it's good to know anyway.
> This sounds interesting, but I wonder what would be the advantages compared to enabling dedup on a specific dataset (disclaimer: I've never used dedup).
In a steady-state system the results should be (almost) identical. But deduplication is either an inline process (which has limited data and thus is less efficient) or post-process (which runs maybe once a day and thus takes a while), while a block clone of a file is instantaneous, it takes no space and you don't have to wait for the next deduplication run to get your free space back. Which is helpful for large files (think qemu disk images).
If you have ever used a (commercial) file system that implements this, you will never want to go back :)
This will only affect you if you do a fresh install of course. If you upgrade it won't touch your config files.
Even recently when I maybe had a use case for it, I just decided to eat the storage space. I was rsyncing from multiple old HDDs to my NAS to have them more easily accessible, and some files are just the same: a few anime series I have rewatched (from the same torrent).
So my guess is that I could save a few hundreds of GBs with dedup, but with all the negative comments I'm leaving it as my last option. If I run out of space I can either buy more, or spend some time reorganizing stuff manually.
But seriously, I picked up FreeBSD a few years ago when centos went proprietary. Just got back into fiddling with the box recently, and great timing!
I’ve set up web servers in Linux many times. The differences between distros makes learning and implementing things a bit more fragmented. FreeBSD still gives you options, but feels like the path is more straightforward.