FreeBSD fans: version 10.3, which first hit beta in February, has gone to stable release.

The Linux-watchers at Phoronix highlight improvements to its Linux binary compatibility layer, which will be welcome news to developers working on both platforms.

According to the release notes, the improvements mean the compatibility layer “is capable of running 64-bit applications on amd64 (x86_64), 1:1 threading, VDSO and subset of the epoll(7) family sufficient for the majority of programs.”

(VDSO is the virtual dynamic shared object implementation, for calling kernel code from userland).

Improvements to the UEFI bootloader include following /boot/config and /boot.config files, working multi-device boot support, and command line argument parsing. The project has added Graphics Output Protocol (GOP) and Universal Graphics Adapter (UGA) handling to the bootloader, and ZFS boot capability with support for multiple ZFS boot environments.

The Gnome packaged with FreeBSD has been upgraded to version 3.16.2, and Xorg-Server is now 1.17.4.

Supported architectures include amd64, i386, PowerPC, PowerPC64, Sparc64 and ARM v6. ®