BSD News Archives

FreeBSD 15.0 had been aiming to offer a KDE desktop installation option as part of the FreeBSD OS installer. This initiative as part of the FreeBSD laptop support enhancements project didn't pan out in time for FreeBSD 15.0 but now they are working on getting the installer option ready for FreeBSD 15.1. Adding a NVIDIA GPU driver option to the FreeBSD installer was also recently carried out.

For helping with the I/O performance in virtualized environments, merged this week to the DragonFlyBSD development code is multi-queue support for its VirtIO block "virtio_blk" driver.

As we have been covering over the past year, major investments have been made to better the outlook for running FreeBSD on laptop hardware. From WiFi driver improvements to enhancing suspend/resume, power management, graphics drivers, and other features, it's been a big undertaking to make FreeBSD work better on laptops. The FreeBSD Foundation calls 2025 as having brought "transformative changes" for the FreeBSD laptop experience.

While FreeBSD 15 stable was officially released earlier this month, MidnightBSD continues plotting its own course atop its FreeBSD 13 base. Out today is MidnightBSD 4.0 as the latest iteration of this desktop-minded BSD operating system.

FreeBSD 15.0 is officially released as the newest major update to this leading BSD operating system.

Ahead of the FreeBSD 15.0 stable release expected to be announced next week, the FreeBSD project today published their Q3-2025 status report to outline their various development accomplishments from July through September.

FreeBSD 15.0-RC3 shipped just a few days ago as what was expected to be the final release candidate before FreeBSD 15.0 stable is officially unveiled next week. But squeezing out today is FreeBSD 15.0-RC4 to address last minute issues.

FreeBSD 15.0 is working toward its stable release in early December. As part of reaching that major release, FreeBSD 15.0-RC3 released today as what may be the final release candidate before FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE.

FreeBSD 15.0-RC1 is available today for testing as this leading BSD operating system works toward the stable release in early December.

FreeBSD 15.0-RC1 had been expected this weekend but instead a fifth beta release of FreeBSD 15.0 was deemed warranted.

The Open Container Initiative unveiled today the OCI Runtime Specification v1.3 update for this standard around operating system process and application containers. This runtime specification continues to evolve for outlining the configuration, execution environment, and lifecycle of a container. Notable with the v1.3 revision is introducing official FreeBSD support.

The fourth and final beta of FreeBSD 15 is out today for testing with the official release continuing to align for an early December debut.

A big focus for the FreeBSD 15.0 development was on supporting reproducible builds as has been a growing trend in the open-source ecosystem in recent years. One month out from the official FreeBSD 15.0 release, the FreeBSD project is today celebrating having crossed the milestone of being able to be built reproducibly and as well now building FreeBSD without requiring root privileges.

The newest weekly test release of the FreeBSD 15.0 is now available for evaluation ahead of the planned December official release.

Theo de Raadt released OpenBSD 7.8 today as the newest feature release to this popular BSD operating system.

FreeBSD 15.0 Beta 2 is out as the newest weekly test release of FreeBSD working its way toward a stable release in early December.

The first beta release of the FreeBSD 15 operating system is now available for testing.

FreeBSD 15.0 continues working its way toward a stable release in early December and out today is the fifth alpha release.

FreeBSD 15.0 Alpha 4 is out today as the newest weekly test release in working toward the FreeBSD 15 stable release in early December.

The third weekly alpha release of the upcoming FreeBSD 15 operating system is now available for testing.

The second alpha release of the upcoming FreeBSD 15 is now available for testing ahead of its planned official release in December.

While the BSDs don't see nearly as much activity around Wayland as the desktop Linux distributions and they continue to predominantly rely on the X.Org Server by default, the modern KDE Plasma 6 desktop can in fact work fine on Wayland under FreeBSD 14 and the upcoming FreeBSD 15.0 release.

The first alpha release of FreeBSD 15.0 is now available! FreeBSD 15.0 is a major update to this BSD operating system that aims for its stable release before Christmas.

The FreeBSD project on Friday published their quarterly status report to highlight all of the interesting changes for Q2'2025. Among the recent FreeBSD efforts have been on "bsd-user-4-linux" to allow FreeBSD binaries to run unmodified on Linux systems. FreeBSD is also coming up with a policy around AI/LLM usage for contributing to the project. Additionally, Sylve is taking shape as a new web-based unified system management platform for FreeBSD systems.

GhostBSD 25.02-R14.3p2 was announced this evening as the newest incremental update to this FreeBSD 14 based operating system focused on providing a nice out-of-the-box desktop experience. Notable with this new GhostBSD release is now shipping a Gershwin community preview for this desktop environment focused on providing a Mac OS X like user experience, complete with GNUstep usage.

Bhyve is the BSD hypervisor / virtual machine manager (VMM) developed by FreeBSD that supports a range of operating systems and across CPU vendors. With time Bhyve has also been ported to other BSDs and even Illumos and macOS. The Linux kernel is now in the process of adding guest detection for the Bhyve hypervisor in order to support VMs with 255+ vCPUs.

It's just not Microsoft Windows and to a lesser extent Linux that can have challenges in dealing with heterogeneous CPU cores like Intel P/E hybrid cores but FreeBSD developers have begun working through those headaches too in trying to ensure a good experience of modern laptops running this BSD operating system.

NetBSD 11.0 release preparations have begun. The NetBSD developers are hoping to officially release NetBSD 11.0 in October and for that to happen the release candidate would be out in September and daily beta builds can already be tested.

The crew working on enhancing the FreeBSD laptop support is hoping to have an install option within the installer of FreeBSD 15 that will easily provide a KDE Plasma based desktop environment.

DragonFlyBSD has updated its Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display driver code that it ports over from what's available in the upstream Linux kernel. The latest revision to the DragonFlyBSD kernel graphics driver code enables support for some new hardware platforms but remains woefully behind the latest generation dGPUs/iGPUs and what is found in the upstream Linux kernel.

As a nice stepping stone until FreeBSD 15 is ready to ship later in the calendar year, FreeBSD 14.3 stable is out today as the newest point release for this leading BSD operating system.

Going on since last year has been an effort to improve FreeBSD laptop support with backing by Dell, AMD, Framework Computer, Netflix, and others. This has focused on better WiFi driver support, enhancing power management, and other improvements for modern laptops. That work has been continuing on all fronts for improving the FreeBSD laptop user experience.

FreeBSD developers have been working a lot on their wireless/WiFi driver support in recent months as part of their broader initiative for improving their operating system support for laptops. While a lot of progress has been made on seeing more modern WiFi support and recent WiFi chipsets being enabled, it's still not complete and that puts FreeBSD 15 in a tough position. FreeBSD 15 is set to be released later this year and will likely declare their wireless support as "unstable" to allow time for making future breaking modifications.

The release candidate of FreeBSD 14.3 is now available for testing ahead of the official operating system release this month.

The FreeBSD project today published their status report outlining their development happenings during Q1'2025. There's been a lot going on in the FreeBSD world, especially for improving laptop support and other modern hardware coverage for this BSD operating system.

FreeBSD 14.3 Beta 3 is ready for testing as the newest test release on the road to the FreeBSD 14.3 point release due out in June.

While it took two and a half years for DragonFlyBSD 6.4.1 to materialize from DragonFlyBSD 6.4, only one week passed since that recent v6.4.1 release to now see v6.4.2.

The second beta release of FreeBSD 14.3 is now available for testing as an incremental update to this BSD operating system and ahead of the feature-rich FreeBSD 15.0 due out later in 2025.

For those with a common USB Video Class "UVC" web camera, it could soon finally see support under the DragonFlyBSD operating system.

The first beta release of FreeBSD 14.3 was released on Friday night for testing. FreeBSD 14.3 will become the newest stable release this summer while later in 2025 we can look forward to the big FreeBSD 15.0 release.

For fans of the DragonFlyBSD operating system, DragonFlyBSD 6.4.1 has been released after two and a half years to ship various bug fixes for this popular BSD.

Theo de Raadt announced today the release of OpenBSD 7.7, the 58th release for this BSD operating system over the past two decades.

It's been a while since having any exciting feature development to talk about with DragonFlyBSD but merged this past week was dm_target_crypt_ng, a next-generation implementation of their DM-crypt code for disk encryption.

Over the past number of months there has been an effort underway to improve FreeBSD laptop support with financial backing by Dell, AMD, and Framework among others. This has resulted in power management improvements, increasing the focus on WiFi driver support for FreeBSD, and related areas to make FreeBSD on laptops more appealing and relevant in 2025.

FreeBSD 13.5 is out today as the final update to the FreeBSD 13 series. Users should begin making plans for upgrading to the current FreeBSD 14 stable series or eyeing the future FreeBSD 15.0 release.

The FreeBSD Foundation paired with resources committed by AMD, Dell, and Framework are working to improve FreeBSD laptop support. In recent months there have been FreeBSD development efforts to improve the power management support with modern laptops as well as a strong focus on enhancing the WiFi driver support. A status update was issued yesterday for highlighting the latest FreeBSD laptops efforts.

The FreeBSD project this morning published their quarterly status report that outlines all of the interesting OS improvements and other changes made during Q4'2024.

FreeBSD 13.5 Beta 3 is out this weekend in being the newest weekly development version leading towards next month's stable release to cap off the FreeBSD 13 series.

Following last week's FreeBSD 13.5 Beta 1 release to kick off this next FreeBSD 13 point release that will also end the series, FreeBSD 13.5 Beta 2 is out this weekend for testing.

The FreeBSD 13.5 release dance has begun for closing out the FreeBSD 13 series.