FreeBSD 15.1-RC2 Restores PadLock RNG For VIA & Zhaoxin CPUs

A second release candidate of FreeBSD 15.1 was warranted and in turn released this weekend which now pushes the stable release back by one week.

FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE was supposed to be out tomorrow, 2 June, but is now pushed back to 9 June due to the emergence of 15.1-RC2 this weekend. FreeBSD 15.1-RC2 brings some last minute fixes, including the restoring of the VIA PadLock RNG driver on FreeBSD. While VIA x86 CPUs are very rare these days, the PadLock instruction set is also used by CPUs from Zhaoxin for random number generation (RNG) and cryptography. FreeBSD 15.1 AMD64 kernels now include the PadLock RNG driver by default.

FreeBSD 15.1-RC2 also updates Unbound and ensures its syslogd is no longer leaking memory when using casper_ttymsg. That's it for the last minute changes to FreeBSD 15.1.

Those wanting to try out 15.1-RC2 can do so via the mailing list announcement. Look for FreeBSD 15.1 stable to debut next Tuesday assuming no further issues come up in the following days.