The release candidate version of FreeBSD 14.0 was released this weekend, and developers are working hard to release the stable version of FreeBSD 14 in early November. FreeBSD14 is the last series to support 32-bit systems. FreeBSD15 will drop support for 32-bit hardware platforms, but FreeBSD1564-bit systems will retain support for running 32-bit binaries. This 32-bit binary compatibility is expected to be supported until at least FreeBSD16.
FreeBSD14 also adds a new "fwget" tool for obtaining firmware packages. The fwget tool can initially obtain firmware for Intel and AMD GPUs.
Many other changes in FreeBSD14 include: dma replacing sendmail, Kinst becoming the new DTrace provider, makefs adding ZFS support, boottrace becoming a new interface for capturing trace events during system startup and shutdown, kernel TLS offloading to handle sink offloading for TLS1.3, initial WPA support for WiFi6, sh is now the default shell for the root user, and an updated LLVM toolchain.
FreeBSD14 based on ARM64 and AMD64 now supports up to 1024 CPU cores, up from the current 256 core limit. AMDEPYCBergamo now allows 128 cores/256 threads per socket, exceeding the current FreeBSD limits, so at least FreeBSD 14.0 allows the use of these high core count servers.
In addition to this, FreeBSD14 will also reboot faster, ISA sound card support has been removed, and the new Intel QAT driver has more features and support than the previous FreeBSD QATQuickAssist technology driver. Netflix also sponsored the removal of many other old drivers in FreeBSD.
The ongoing release notes also list other interesting details about the upcoming FreeBSD14 release:
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.0R/relnotes/
Friday's FreeBSD 14.0-RC1 release announcement outlines updates to Linux KPIs, various WiFi updates, and race condition fixes for this week's release candidate. At least two more release candidates are expected before FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE is released around November 7th.