The release of the desktop-oriented operating system MidnightBSD 4.0.4 has occurred, based on FreeBSD with elements ported from DragonFly BSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. The basic desktop environment is built on Xfce, with the option to install the GNUstep + Window Maker + GWorkspace combination. Unlike other FreeBSD desktop builds, MidnightBSD originated as a fork of FreeBSD 6.1-beta and synchronized with the FreeBSD 7 codebase in 2011, absorbing features from FreeBSD 9-13 branches. MidnightBSD uses the mport system for package management, storing indexes and metadata in a SQLite database, or the Ravenports toolkit. To download, a 1 GB installation image is available for i386 and amd64 architectures.
In the latest release of MidnightBSD:
- Integrated capabilities for verifying the age groups of users required by certain countries’ laws have been added. This includes the aged background process, configurable through the “aged_enable” parameter in /etc/rc.conf, and the agectl utility. The adduser utility now prompts for age when creating a new user account. The agectl utility can be used to assign age or date of birth to existing accounts. The root user is defaulted into the 18+ category. Packages have added support for an age category flag, checked during installation to block access based on age category settings. Applications can utilize the agectl utility, the agev_get_age_bracket function from the libutil library, or communicate with the aged process via a socket for age detection.
- A fix for the CVE-2026-4747 vulnerability, addressing code execution at the kernel level by sending network packets to the NFS server, has been incorporated from FreeBSD.
- An amd-cppc driver managing power consumption modes and frequency for AMD Zen 2
/Reports, release notes, official announcements.