FreeBSD 13.1 released: Performance improvements and Better RISC-V support

FreeBSD 13.1 has been released , which provides performance improvements and better RISC-V support. 

Here are some of the more important changes:

Userland application changes

• For 64-bit architectures, position-independent executable (PIE) support is enabled by default on the underlying system.
• New zfskeys rc (8) service script that allows automatic decryption of ZFS datasets encrypted with ZFS native encryption during startup.
• NVMe emulation upgraded to version 1.4 of the NVMe specification
• Added additional Alt Gr mapping for the Brazilian Portuguese ABNT2 keyboard.
• svnlite is disabled in builds by default

Runtime Libraries and APIs

• Added assembly-optimized code for OpenSSL on powerpc, powerpc64, and powerpc64le.
• Detection of CPU features speeds up cryptographic operations for ARMv7 and ARM64 has been fixed to greatly speed up aes-256-gcm and sha256.
• Enables building ASAN and UBSAN libraries on risc-v 64 and riscv-64-sf.
• The OFED library is now built on riscv64 and riscv64sf. 
• The OPENMP library is now built on riscv64 and riscv64sf.

kernel changes

• Fix corrupted output on serial console on powerpc64. 
• CAS already supports Radix MMU.
• Fix running FreeBSD with HPT superpage on QEMU with TCG.
• Superpage support has been added to pmap_mincore on powerpc64 (le).
• Added HWCAP/HWCAP2 auxiliary parameter support for 32-bit ARM binaries on arm64.

Platform support

• Added support for HiFive Unmatched RISC-V boards.

More details can be found here: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.1R/relnotes/