FreeBSD 13.1 Released

FreeBSD 13.1 has been released today. Some of the new features include UEFI boot improvements for AMD64, a wide variety of hardware driver improvements, and support for freebsd-update to allow creating automated snapshots of the boot environment to try to make operating system updates foolproof. Phoronix reports: Some of the other changes with FreeBSD 13.1 include enabling Position Independent Executable (PIE) support by default on 64-bit architectures, a new “zfskeys” service script for the automatic decryption of ZFS datasets, NVMe emulation with Bhyve hypervisor, chroot now supports unprivileged operations, various POWER and RISC-V improvements, big endian support improvements, support for the HiFive Unmatched RISC-V development board, updating against OpenZFS file-system support upstream, and many other changes throughout this BSD open-source ecosystem. Downloads and the full change-log for FreeBSD 13.1 can be found here.

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System76-Scheduler Is a New Pop!_OS Rust Effort To Improve Desktop Responsiveness

slack_justyb writes: “Quietly making its v1.0 debut yesterday was system76-scheduler as a Rust-written daemon aiming to improve Linux desktop responsiveness and catering to their Pop!_OS distribution,” reports Phoronix.

The daemon will work with the kernel’s CFS scheduler to give priority to components that System76 deems important for its distro. Out of the box, the scheduler will assign priority to the X.Org Server and desktop window managers/compositors, while pushing compilers and other background tasks lower. However, the scheduler will be configurable via Rusty Object Notation (RON) files found in /etc/system76-scheduler/assignments/ and /usr/share/system76-scheduler/assignments/.

Over on the GitHub page for the project, the team indicates that they are indeed making a trade-off from the default CFS to benefit Desktop configurations over the typical load a server might see.

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