Written as part of the FreeBSD Project’s 3rd Quarter 2025 Status Report, check out the highlights of what we did to help FreeBSD last quarter:

The post FreeBSD Foundation Q3 2025 Status Update first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.

FreeBSD 15.0 landed earlier this week, and we read through the release notes with a fine-toothed comb to highlight some of the key improvements. Here are the standouts.

The post FreeBSD 15: Why You’ll Want It first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.

As a third-year computer science student and the BOFH of The :wheel Group—an operating-systems student club at my university—I’ve always kept an eye on BSD systems but never quite found the time to explore them.

One day, while scrolling through my Fediverse feed, I came across the FreeBSD Foundation’s Mastodon toot announcing that the travel-grant deadline was approaching. On a whim, I applied—figuring it would be a great opportunity to learn and bring new insights back to my student club. You can imagine my surprise when I found out my application had been approved!

I arrived a day early and spent time wandering through Zagreb’s old town. Since my hostel was nearby and the evening was still young, I also stopped by the conference venue for a quick look.

Although the first day was reserved for the FreeBSD Developer Summit, I showed up hoping to lend a hand to the organizers and maybe meet some attendees in advance. While no extra help was needed, I asked if it might be possible to sit in—and to my delight, I was introduced to Ed Maste, who kindly allowed me to attend.

The opening session—led by Benedict Reuschling—included a lively icebreaker where attendees arranged themselves according to different criteria, such as how many conferences they’d attended or how far they’d traveled to Zagreb. It was a fun way to connect with people right away. Afterward, I spoke with Benedict, who expressed interest in giving a guest lecture at my university.

The technical sessions were equally engaging. Greg Wallace’s Learnings from the FreeBSD Enterprise Working Group shed light on enterprise-adoption challenges, while Brooks Davis’s talk on the CHERI security architecture was particularly fascinating. Ed Maste’s update on Foundation projects introduced me to Grimoire and Sylve, and Sven Ruediger and Lukas Engelhardt’s presentation on pkgbase explained how FreeBSD’s new upgrade mechanism replaces the traditional freebsd-update(8).

That evening, I joined a group of developers for dinner at a local restaurant, enjoying both great food and great conversation about FreeBSD and open-source development.

On the second and third days, I attended Kirk McKusick’s legendary workshops on FreeBSD internals. As one of BSD’s principal authors, Kirk shared not only deep technical knowledge but also stories that made the sessions lively and accessible. I came away with a clearer understanding of FreeBSD’s kernel structure, process management, security subsystems, virtual-memory implementation, I/O and device interfaces, file systems, and networking stack.

Each evening, I met more developers and exchanged ideas about potential lectures and workshops for my student club.

The main conference opened the following day. Jan Bramkamp’s Fast FreeBSD Jail Provisioning on ZFS demonstrated sub-second jail deployment using clever ZFS-dataset techniques—a highlight for me. I also enjoyed Hans-Jörg Höxer’s Confidential Computing with OpenBSD, which explored AMD’s SEV/SEV-ES virtualization extensions, and Roller Angel’s session on Ansible/Salt automation, which sparked several project ideas.

At the evening social, I even packaged Benjamin Stürz’s fuse-ufs driver
for Gentoo Linux and had another wonderful chat with Kirk and Eric.

The final day began with Kirk McKusick’s talk, The History of the BSD Daemon, filled with fascinating anecdotes about the mascot’s evolution. Patrick M. Hausen followed with insights on deploying FreeBSD on Hetzner servers—an area that closely matches my interests. Most inspiring of all was Jake Freeland’s presentation on Capsicum, which convinced me to focus my bachelor’s thesis on FreeBSD.

I want to express my deepest gratitude to the FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring my trip to EuroBSDCon in Zagreb. The experience far exceeded my expectations—educational, inspiring, and filled with genuine community warmth.

This was my first BSD conference, but certainly not my last.

Looking ahead, I plan to introduce FreeBSD to my university through lectures and workshops with The :wheel Group, integrate it into my own workflows, and contribute back to the project as part of my ongoing studies and future career.

Respectfully,
Leah Budzicka

The post 2025 EuroBSDCon Trip Report – Leah Budzicka first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.

This year’s EuroBSDcon took place at the faculty of engineering and computing of the University of Zagreb, Croatia.  This was my second time attending EuroBSDcon after holding a talk on my work on
[SIMD-enhanced libc string functions] at EuroBSDcon 2024 in Dublin, and I was really looking forwards to this year’s conference.  I am grateful to the FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring my travels to the conference, as it would have otherwise been hard to afford for me.

I travelled and later shared a room with Jan Bramkamp, who held an excellent talk on ZFS-based jail provisioning at the conference.  Living in Berlin, Germany, we took the opportunity to travel to Zagreb by ICE train to Munich and the via sleeper car to Zagreb.  This allowed us to reach the venue well rested, and gave us a chance to enjoy a scenic view of the Slovenian countryside.  At the conference, we were joined by Getz Mikalsen and Benni Stürz, two students who were introduced to the project through participation in last year’s Google Summer of Code, as well as another interested student from Berlin.

For the first time, this year’s EuroBSDcon was extended to five days. The first two days were allocated to the FreeBSD Dev Summit, followed by the Eurobhyvecon, with tutorials running in parallel.  On the fourth
and fifth days, the EuroBSDcon proper was held, with a wide assortment of talks in three parallel tracks.

The first day of the FreeBSD devsummit, I was most interested in the talks on the progress of the pkgbase project (slated to replace our home-grown freebsd-update(8) with proper packaging in FreeBSD 15), as
well as the upstreaming of the CHERI work.  I ended up spending a lot of time in the hallway track as well, catching up with many of the other project members attending the conference.  An unexpected item of
interest was Alfonso Siciliano’s talk on accessibility in FreeBSD, a topic you seldomly hear about otherwise.

The second day brought some interesting insights into the function of the core team and the various problems its members are dealing with, as well as some insights into libzfs.  The third day was a bit of a
beather; I did not attend Eurobhyvecon, and later ended up joining some other developers on a trip to the Technical Museum Nikola Tesla just a short walk away.

The fourth and fifth days were both packed with talks to the point where it was some times hard to pick a track to attend.  Following my colleage Jan Bramkamp’s talk on FreeBSD jail provisioning with ZFS,
I learned a lot about the challenges in porting OpenJDK to FreeBSD in Harald Eilertsen’s talk; as a frequent contributor to the ports tree, dealing with such problems is of particular interest.  In the next
slot, a talk on a lightweight protocol for job servers to be used in parallel build tools like make(1) gave some new directions for how to tackle this problem in a tool-independent manner.  Following a pkgbase
talk, Björn Zeeb went into details on the progress made in getting WLAN drivers to work on FreeBSD—a vital issue for our quest to improve Laptop support.  While my laptop’s Qualcomm QCNFA765 adapter
remains unsupported for now, great inroads have apparently been made and it’s only a matter of time for full support.  The day was closed with a talk on the FreeBSD ports tree by Moin Rahman, a discussion on
which we ended up continuing at the social event.

On the final day, I unfortunately missed the keynote but managed to attend Kirk McKusick’s presentation on the history of the UNIX daemon (the first edition of which I had missed last year).  After lunch, there
was a tricky pick between Charlie Li’s MIDI talk and John Baldwin’s presentation on linkers, the latter of which I ended up attending.  This was followed by a talk on decentralized internet services, and then a
very enlightening talk on the inner workings of USB-C.  Before closing, I attended a talk on the use of FreeBSD for better UNIX education.  This was of particular interest as we hold an annual course on UNIX systems administration, covering FreeBSD, AIX, and Solaris, at FU Berlin and have been looking into ways to improve the material.

Besides the conference program, I am grateful for the opportunities to meet many of the other FreeBSD developers and talk about many of the issues and project ideas floating around.  I hope that next year’s
conference in Brussels, Belgium will be just as great as this one!

With big thanks to the FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring this trip.

Robert Clausecker
 

The post EuroBSDcon 2025 Trip Report – Robert Clausecker first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.

FreeBSD has been included as an officially supported platform in version 1.3 of the Open Container Initiative (OCI) runtime specification, released November 4, 2025. This milestone marks a significant achievement for FreeBSD and represents years of dedicated work by volunteers in the community to bring cloud-native container technology to the platform.

A Major Step Forward for FreeBSD

This inclusion in the OCI runtime spec represents a watershed moment for FreeBSD, solidifying its position as a first-class platform for modern cloud-native workloads. Official OCI support means that FreeBSD users can now leverage the full ecosystem of container tools and orchestration platforms with confidence, knowing they’re working with a standardized, vendor-neutral specification. For organizations already running FreeBSD in production, this opens doors to containerized application deployment strategies that align with industry standards, making FreeBSD an even more compelling choice for cloud infrastructure, edge computing, and enterprise deployments.

Building on FreeBSD’s Virtualization Heritage

The addition of cloud-native container support complements FreeBSD’s already robust virtualization capabilities, particularly the powerful FreeBSD jails technology that has been a cornerstone of the operating system for over two decades. In fact, OCI containers on FreeBSD are implemented using jails as the underlying isolation mechanism, bringing together the security and resource management benefits of jails with the portability and ecosystem advantages of OCI-compliant containers. This marriage of technologies gives FreeBSD users the best of both worlds: the lightweight, secure isolation that jails are known for, combined with the standardized tooling and image formats that have made containers ubiquitous in modern software development.

A Community Effort Years in the Making

This achievement is the culmination of extensive development work led by volunteer Doug Rabson, with support and collaboration from numerous contributors across the OCI community, the FreeBSD Project, and the FreeBSD Foundation. The path to official OCI support has been marked by several key milestones:

• 2021: Samuel Karp released runj, the first OCI runtime for FreeBSD, with support for containerd, demonstrating the viability of running OCI containers on the platform.
• 2022: Doug Rabson added FreeBSD support to Buildah and Podman, two critical container management tools. This work required key changes to the FreeBSD kernel to meet the requirements of the OCI runtime specification, effectively paving the way for today’s official recognition.
• 2024: Dave Cottlehuber led the work to include FreeBSD official OCI images, which first appeared in 14.2. They are available on Docker Hub and GitHub Container Registry. 
• 2025: Doug Rabson led the work to add FreeBSD as a platform to the OCI runtime specification, it is available in v1.3. 

The FreeBSD Foundation would like to take this opportunity to recognize the tireless efforts of Samuel Karp and Doug Rabson in driving this initiative forward, as well as to all the contributors who have helped make FreeBSD a fully-supported OCI platform.

Looking Ahead

With official OCI runtime spec support now in place, FreeBSD is better positioned than ever to serve the needs of modern infrastructure and application development. We look forward to seeing how the community leverages this capability to build innovative solutions on FreeBSD.

Stay up to date:

• Join the FreeBSD jail mailing list for updates about cloud native containers 
• Help develop cloud native container technologies for FreeBSD by joining the working group 

The post FreeBSD Officially Supported in OCI Runtime Specification v1.3 first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.

# pkg install -y podman-suite

# zfs create -o mountpoint=/var/db/containers zroot/containers

# cp /usr/local/etc/containers/pf.conf.sample /etc/pf.conf
# sysctl net.pf.filter_local=1

# service pf enable
# service pf start

# service linux enable
# service linux start

$ doas podman run ghcr.io/freebsd/freebsd-runtime:14.3 freebsd-version
14.3-RELEASE

$ doas podman run --rm --os=linux docker.io/alpine cat /etc/os-release | head -1
NAME="Alpine Linux"

$ doas podman run --os=linux -p 80:80 -v $PWD/website:/usr/share/caddy -v caddy_data:/data docker.io/caddy

doas podman run -it --os=linux docker.io/phips/pandas:v3 /bin/bash

The post An introduction to OCI Containers on FreeBSD first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.

The FreeBSD Foundation is excited to welcome the community to the 2025 FreeBSD Vendor Summit, taking place November 6–7, 2025 at NetApp Headquarters in San Jose, California.

The Vendor Summit is a collaborative event that brings together organizations deploying FreeBSD in production and the developers building the operating system. It provides a valuable forum to share operational insights, address technical challenges, and shape future development priorities that support commercial use cases.

This year’s program includes:

• Keynote: “Operationalizing AI for Engineering at NetApp” – Jerome Roussin & Chris Archibald, NetApp
• Keynote: “Why Karios.ai Matters” by Ian Evan
• New in 15.0 Demo – John Baldwin (FreeBSD Project) & Ed Maste (FreeBSD Foundation)
• 15.0-RELEASE and pkgbase – Colin Percival (FreeBSD Project)
• FreeBSD/CHERI: Bringing Memory Safety to FreeBSD –Brooks Davis (Capabilities Limited)
• A talk from Michael Winser (Alpha-Omega)
• Panel: Emerging Security Trends and Their Impact on FreeBSD

— and more!

Along with:

• Technical deep dives and roadmap discussions
  
• Opportunities to highlight product and platform requirements
  
• Open conversations between industry engineers and FreeBSD project contributors
  
• Networking with organizations who rely on FreeBSD in mission-critical environments
  
  

The Vendor Summit plays an important role in ensuring that FreeBSD continues to evolve in ways that meet the needs of companies deploying it at scale.

Registration & Participation

Registration is required to attend and space is limited.

Event Registration (Eventbrite):
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/november-2025-freebsd-vendor-summit-registration-1763651331609

Event overview:
https://staging.freebsdfoundation.org/news-and-events/event-calendar/fall-2025-freebsd-summit/

Whether you are a long-time user or newly exploring FreeBSD for your infrastructure, we invite you to join the discussion and help influence the future direction of the operating system.

We look forward to seeing many of you next week and to another productive summit of innovation and collaboration across the FreeBSD ecosystem.

Thank you to NetApp for hosting the summit.

The post FreeBSD Vendor Summit Happening Next Week — November 6–7, 2025 first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that it has completed work to build FreeBSD without requiring root privilege. We have implemented support for all source release builds to use no-root infrastructure, eliminating the need for root privileges across the FreeBSD release pipeline. This work was completed as part of the program commissioned by the Sovereign Tech Agency.

The changes are currently available in the FreeBSD development branch and, where possible, are being merged into the release branch for FreeBSD 15.0.

Building FreeBSD release artifacts no longer requires root access to create device files, set proper ownership, and mount file systems during the build process. This has improved security and made automated builds simpler.

Now, every FreeBSD release artifact can be built without root privileges:

• Dual-mode ISO images for USB flash drives and CD/DVD installation media
• Memstick images for bootable USB drives
• VM images for virtual machine deployment
• Cloud disk images for AWS, Azure, and other cloud platforms

Removing the need for root privileges in the build pipeline has reduced the attack surface and potential for privilege escalation. It enables safer and more flexible build environments, both for official infrastructure and for community contributors.

Reproducible Builds

In parallel with the no-root work, FreeBSD has introduced several changes to improve build reproducibility – ensuring that identical source inputs always produce identical binary outputs, byte-for-byte. These changes span the operating system itself, the release tooling, and the build process.

Key improvements include:

• Elimination or normalization of timestamps
• Stable ordering of file lists, package metadata, and similar data
• Consistent build environments, including debug paths and locale settings
• Reproducible artifact support in build tools such as the file system image creation utility mkimg(1)

Reproducible builds strengthen the integrity and transparency of the entire software supply chain. They enable verifiable trust, improved debugging and auditing, simplify continuous integration, and support long-term maintainability.

FreeBSD continuous integration systems and automated build infrastructure can now operate in unprivileged containers and restricted environments. Contributors can also now build complete FreeBSD releases on their local systems without elevated privileges.

FreeBSD now builds safely, reproducibly, and without root. It’s faster, more secure, and more transparent – ready for anyone, anywhere, to build with trust.

The post FreeBSD now builds reproducibly and without root privilege first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.

The post NetActuate Sponsors Bare-Metal Server to Strengthen FreeBSD Project’s CI Infrastructure first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.

We are pleased to announce the July/August/September 2025 issue of the FreeBSD Journal is now available! This online publication provides the FreeBSD community with valuable insights and technical knowledge each quarter.

The focus of this quarter’s issue is Embedded FreeBSD. Inside, you’ll find articles exploring how FreeBSD is used in embedded systems, from practical implementation guides to innovative case studies. Topics include starting firewall development, writing effective bug reports, implementing a quantum-safe website on FreeBSD, and getting started with Wi-Fi development.

Thank you to all the contributors who made this issue possible. The FreeBSD Journal highlights the work and expertise of the FreeBSD community. As always, it is freely available in HTML format.

Read the Q3 2025 Issue Here

Please take a moment to read the issue, share it with your colleagues, and help spread the word that the FreeBSD Journal is always free.

The post The Q3 2025 Issue of the FreeBSD Journal is Now Available! first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.