The article is a detailed appreciation of FreeBSD, highlighting its stability, performance, and cohesive design, contrasting it with Linux and other BSDs, and discussing hardware compatibility, release management, and system administration experiences. It emphasizes FreeBSD's strengths in documentation, security, and system integration, while also touching on challenges like release support and containerization.
Linux 6.18 will include fixes for lockups caused by systemd units reading many files on filesystems with the lazytime mount option, which previously led to high CPU usage due to quadratic complexity in inode switching. The update addresses a bug in the writeback code that caused system hangs when handling large numbers of dirty inodes.
Linux is introducing its own version of the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) through the systemd-bsod service. This feature generates a full-screen error message with a QR code to provide more information about boot issues. Currently experimental, it is expected to be included in various Linux distributions by 2024. Meanwhile, there are no significant changes to the Windows BSOD, with Microsoft having made minor alterations in the past.
The latest version of the Linux systemd project, version 255, introduces a new component called systemd-bsod that generates a full-screen display of error messages when a Linux system crashes. Similar to Windows' Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), the Linux version will also include a QR code for easy information lookup. While this feature is currently listed as experimental, systemd is widely used by major Linux distributions, making it likely that most Linux users will eventually encounter this new feature.
Systemd 255 has been released as stable, introducing new features such as systemd-bsod, a "Blue Screen of Death" service for displaying full-screen error messages on Linux, and systemd-vmspawn, a tool for spawning virtual machines. Other highlights include improvements to systemd services spawning, the addition of systemd-pcrlock for managing local TPM2 PCR policies, and the inclusion of a new varlinkctl tool for interfacing with Varlink services. The release also brings support for SECCOMP on the LoongArch 64-bit CPU architecture, hibernation into swap files backed by Btrfs, and various other enhancements and deprecations.
