FreeBSD 15.2 Beta 1 Allows Experimental Cross-Building Of Base Packages On Linux/macOS

FreeBSD 15.2 Beta 1 is out today as the release dance kicks off in working toward the next installment of FreeBSD 15. FreeBSD 15.2 brings dozens of security fixes raised in recent months from use-after-free and heap overflows to missing validations and remote code execution vectors. Unfortunately, quite a lot of security fixes in the era of AI/LLMs. FreeBSD 15.2 introduces experimental support for cross-building base system packages on Linux and macOS hosts. This depends upon the pkg utility being manually setup on the build host. FreeBSD 15.2 on laptops adds a new "backlight_enable" rc.conf option to allow saving and restoring the backlight level across reboots. With FreeBSD 15.2, Clang now defaults to using the LLVM linker ld.lld) unless explicitly overriden. LLVM 21.1.8 is pulled in for FreeBSD 15.2. There are also many other packages updates like OpenSSH 10.4p1, OpenZFS 2.4.4, XZ 5.8.4, and more. For those using FreeBSD in the cloud with Amazon AWS, the EC2 desktop AMIs of FreeBSD now boot to a KDE desktop with XRDP enabled. Last but not least are a variety of hardware driver fixes and new hardware ID additions. More details on the FreeBSD 15.2 changes at large can be found via the release notes. Details on today's beta one release can be found via the FreeBSD-stable mailing list. FreeBSD 15.2 is working toward an official release on 8 December while until then will be weekly betas followed by at least one release candidate over the next month.