TrueOS 18.03 release adds important security and bug fixes

Mar 31, 2018 17:11 GMT  ·  By

TrueOS, the free and open-source FreeBSD derivative, has been updated on Friday to version 18.03, a release that finally includes patches for the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities publicly disclosed in January 2018.

TrueOS 18.03 comes three months after version 17.12 and includes mitigations for the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities that put billions of devices at risk of attacks. It ports all the fixes from FreeBSD to fix Meltdown for systems using Intel-based processors when running virtual machines.

In addition, this release ports all available mitigations from FreeBSD HEAD, including the retpoline mitigation strategy, for the second variant of the Spectre security vulnerability. On top of this, TrueOS developers recommend all users to install the latest microcode update from Intel to fully mitigate Spectre.

But please note that microcode updates aren't enabled by default in TrueOS, so you'll need to manually install the new devcpu-data package from Appcafe, then enable the new microcode_update service. Please keep in mind that you'll need to reboot your machine after installing this packages to mitigate Meltdown and Spectre.

"This is a special release due to the security issues impacting the computing world since the beginning of 2018. In particular, mitigating the “Meltdown” and “Spectre” system exploits make it necessary to update the entire package ecosystem for TrueOS," said developer Ken Moore in the release announcement.

Firefox and Chromium get security updates

Also included in the TrueOS 18.03 release are various updated packages, including LibreSSL  2.6.4, Qt 5.9.4, Chromium 63.0.3239.132, and Mozilla Firefox 58.0.2. According to the TrueOS devs, all pre-installed packages included in this release have been compiled with the latest LLVM/Clang compiler.

In numbers, the TrueOS 18.03 release updates a total of 2984 packages, removes 829 packages, and adds 2461 new packages compared to the previous TrueOS 17.12 version. You can download TrueOS 18.03 right now through our web portal if you want to install this FreeBSD-based operating system on your personal computer.