TrueOS 18.03 released with Spectre & Meltdown fixes
Mr Ken Moore, on behalf of TrueOS team, has announced the availability of TrueOS 18.03, a special release from the TrueOS project. This release was essential to address various issues spread in computing world since the beginning of 2018, which includes Meltdown and Spectre issues. The entire package ecosystem of TrueOS has been updated to address this issues.
TrueOS 18.03 won’t affect the next planned release which is scheduled to launch in June 2018. The 18.03 release is an expected, security update in current stable series.
What is new in TrueOS 18.03?
As mentioned earlier, the main purpose of TrueOS 18.03 is to provide necessary security updates. It addresses well-known issues like Meltdown and Spectre.
- Meltdown fix: The current TrueOS release includes all meltdown fixes included in the upstream project, FreeBSD. It will help to address the security issues affecting systems that utilize Intel-based processors when running virtual machines such as FreeBSD jails.
- Spectre fix: TrueOS 18.03 includes all spectre related mitigations from FreeBSD stable head. All the 3rd-party packages for this release are also compiled with LLVM/Clang 6 (the “retpoline” mitigation strategy). It fixes many memory allocation issues and enforces stricter requirements for code completeness and memory usage within applications.
- Important security package updates like libssl 2.6.4, updated web browsers like Firefox 58.0.2 and chromium 63.x.
- All the precompiled packages have been compiled with LLVM/Clang, except some packages having an inherent dependency on GCC. Building with LLVM will help to fix various memory access related issues.
- And more.
For a complete list of changes, read TrueOS 18.03 release announement published in projects blog.