The FreeBSD RE team has announced the public availability of FreeBSD 12.1 RC1. This is the first release candidate in projects 12.1 series and brings a lot of stability and security improvements over the previous BETA releases.

As usual, FreeBSD 12.1 RC1 is available for a wide range of platforms and devices ranging from Power PCs to small embedded systems. The distribution can be installed by burning on an optical disk or using a USB storage device.

FreeBSD 12.1 RC1 is expected to be more robust comparing to previous development releases in this series. Still, it is likely to have some hard sides. So, it is not recommended to install this release on production systems. This release is mainly for community QA persons who would like to test the release and report bugs in proper channels. Depending on the severity and frequency of bugs reported, it will be fixed before the final release or in subsequent patches.

The main changes in FreeBSD 12.1 RC1 comparing to the FreeBSD 12.1 BETA 3 are summarized below.

• A NULL pointer dereference that could lead to a system crash had been fixed.
• A fix to correctly implement pmap_page_is_mapped() on arm64 and riscv.
• A fix to tun(4) and tap(4) when destroying interfaces had been added.
• A fix to krping to notify sleeping threads of device removal had been added.
• Several updates to mlx5core, mlx5en(4), and mlx5ib(4).
• Several fixes in libusb(3) and xhci(4) have been added.
• Several SCTP and TCP fixes have been added.

For more information, read the official release announcement and release notes.