Netgate‘s pfSense team announced that pfSense Plus version 22.01 and pfSense CE version 2.6.0 are currently available. The latest releases are coming with new features, additional hardware support, and bug fixes. pfSense customers can upgrade the software to pfSense Plus 22.01 and pfSense CE 2.6 by selecting “Next stable version” from the Update menu.
Highlights
The latest releases include following changes:
- Numerous changes to IPsec for stability and performance
- IPsec VTI interface names have changed in this release. Configurations will be updated automatically where possible to use the new names. If any third party software configurations or other manual changes referenced the old IPsec VTI interface names directly (e.g. “ipsecNNNN”), they must be updated to the new format.
- IPsec status page and widget are significantly faster, show more complete information, and have additional useful functionality
- ZFS is now the default filesystem for installations where possible
- New ZFS status dashboard widget (pfSense Plus only)
- New Disks widget to replace the disk usage list in the System Information widget
- This widget is automatically added and enabled if the firewall configuration contains the System Information widget with disk usage section active
- AutoConfigBackup no longer makes pages wait to load during the backup process
- The default password hash format in the User Manager has been changed from bcrypt to SHA-512
- Improvements to the Captive Portal logout page and process
- RAM disks have been converted to tmpfs
pfSense team also warned users that the upgrade process will reinstall all components of the base system and packages, which will increase the time for the upgrade to complete. The team urges users to remove all packages before initiating the upgrade, or not to update packages before running the upgrade. The upgrade process can take 10 to 20 minutes and the firewall may reboot several times.