FreeBSD Archive
If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to try FreeBSD on a laptop, take note – 2025 has brought transformative changes. The Foundation’s ambitious Laptop Support & Usability Project is systematically addressing the gaps that have held FreeBSD back on modern laptop hardware. The project started in 2024 Q4 and covers areas including Wi-Fi, graphics, audio, installer, and sleep states. 2025 has been its first full year, and with a financial commitment of over $750k to date there has been substantial progress. ↫ Alice Sowerby for the FreeBSD Foundation I think that’s an understatement. As part of this effort, FreeBSD introduced support for Wi-Fi 4 and 5 in 2025, with 6 being worked on, and sound support has been greatly improved as well, with new tools and better support for automatic sound redirection for HDA cards. Another major area of improvement is support for various forms of sleep and wake, with modern standby coming in FreeBSD 15.1, and possibly hibernate in 15.2. On top of all this, there’s the usual graphics drivers updates, as well as changes to the installer to make it a bit more friendly to desktop use cases. The FreeBSD project is clearly taking desktop and especially laptop seriously lately, and they’re putting their money and developers where their mouth is. Add in the fact that FreeBSD already has pretty decent Wayland support, and it the platform will be able to continue to offer the latest KDE releases (and GNOME, if they figure out replacements for its systemd dependencies). With progress like this, we’re definitely going to see more and more people making the move to FreeBSD for desktop and laptop use over the coming years.
I have some potentially devastating news for POWER users interested in using FreeBSD, uncovered late last month by none other than Cameron Kaiser. FreeBSD is considering retiring powerpc64 prior to branching 16, which would make FreeBSD 15 the last stable version to support the architecture. (32-bit PowerPC is already dropped as of FreeBSD 14, though both OpenBSD and NetBSD generally serve this use case, and myself I have a Mac mini G4 running a custom NetBSD kernel with code from FreeBSD for automatic restart.) Although the message says “powerpc64 and powerpc64le” it later on only makes specific reference to the big-endian port, whereas both endiannesses appear on the FreeBSD platform page and on the download server. ↫ Cameron Kaiser There’s two POWER9 systems in my office, so this obviously makes me quite sad. At the same time, though, it’s hard not to understand any possible decision to drop powerpc64/powerpc64le at this point in time. Raptor’s excellent POWER9 systems – the Blackbird, which I reviewed a few years ago, and the Talos II, which I also have – are very long in the tooth at this point and still quite expensive, and thanks to IBM royally screwing up POWER10, we never got any timely successors. There were rumblings about a possible POWER11-based successor from Raptor back in July 2025, but it’s been quiet on that front since. In other words, there are no modern powerpc64 and powerpc64le systems available. POWER10 and brand new POWER11 hardware are strictly IBM and incredibly expensive, so unless IBM makes some sort of generous donation to the FreeBSD Foundation, I honestly don’t know how FreeBSD is supposed to keep their powerpc64 and powerpc64le ports up-to-date with the latest generation of POWER hardware in the first place. It’s important to note that no final decision has been made yet, and since that initial report by Kaiser, several people have chimed in to argue the case that at least powerpc64le (the little endian variant) should remain properly supported. In fact, Timothy Pearson from Raptor Engineering stepped up the place, and stated he’s willing to take over maintainership of the port, as Raptor has been contributing to it for years anyway. Raptor remains committed to the architecture as a whole, and we have resources to assist with development. In fact, we sponsor several FreeBSD build machines already in our cloud environment, and have kernel developers working on expanding and maintaining the FreeBSD codebase. If there is any concern regarding hardware availability or developer resources, Raptor is willing and able to assist. ↫ Timothy Pearson Whatever decision the FreeBSD project makes, the Linux world will be fine for a while yet as IBM contributes to its development, and popular distributions still consider POWER a primary target. However, unless either IBM moves POWER hardware downmarket (extremely unlikely) or the rumours around Raptor have merit, I think at least the FreeBSD powerpc64 (big endian) port is done for, with the powerpc64le port hopefully being saved by people hearing these alarm bells.
The FreeBSD team has released FreeBSD 15.0, and with it come several major changes, one of which you will surely want to know more about if you’re a FreeBSD user. Since this change will eventually drastically change the way you use FreeBSD, we should get right into it. Up until now, a full, system-wide update for FreeBSD – as in, updating both the base operating system as well as any packages you have installed on top of it – would use two separate tools: freebsd-update and the pkg package manager. You used the former to update the base operating system, which was installed as file sets, and the latter to update everything you had installed on top of it in the form of packages. With FreeBSD 15.0, this is starting to change. Instead of using two separate tools, in 15.0 you can opt to deprecate freebsd-update and file sets, and rely entirely on pkg for updating both the base operating system as well as any packages you have installed, because with this new method, the base system moves from file sets to packages. When installing FreeBSD 15.0, the installer will ask you to choose between the old method, or the new pkg-only method. Packages (pkgbase / New Method): The base system is installed as a set of packages from the “FreeBSD-base” repository. Systems installed this way are managed entirely using the pkg(8) tool. This method is used by default for all VM images and images published in public clouds. In FreeBSD 15.0, pkgbase is offered as a technology preview, but it is expected to become the standard method for managing base system installations and upgrades in future releases. ↫ FreeBSD 15.0 release announcement As the release announcement notes, the net method is optional in FreeBSD 15 and will remain optional during the entire 15.x release cycle, but the plan is to deprecate freebsd-update and file sets entirely in FreeBSD 16.0. If you have an existing installation you wish to convert to using pkgbase, there’s a tool called pkgbasify to do just that. It’s sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation, so it’s not some random script. Of course, there’s way more in this release than just pkgbase. Of note is that the 32bit platforms i386, armv6, and 32-bit powerpc have been retired, but of course, 32bit code will continue to run on their 64bit counterparts. FreeBSD 15.0 also brings a native inotify implementation, a ton of improvements to the audio components, improved Intel Wi-Fi drivers, and so, so much more.
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. ↫ FreeBSD Foundation blog This is great news in and of itself, but there’s more: FreeBSD has also improved build reproducability. This means that given the same source input, you should end up with the same binary output, which is an important part of building a verifiable chain of trust. These two improvements combined further add to making FreeBSD a trustworthy, secure option – something it already is anyway. In case you haven’t noticed, the FreeBSD project and its countless contributors are making a ton of tangible progress lately on a wide variety of topics, from improving desktop use, to solidifying Wi-Fi support, to improving the chain of trust. I think the time is quite right for FreeBSD to make some inroads in the desktop UNIX-y space, especially for people to whom desktop Linux has strayed too far from the traditional UNIX philosphy (whatever that means).
FreeBSD offers a whole bunch of technologies and tools to make gaming on the platform a lot more capable than you’d think, and this article by Pertho dives into the details. Running all your games inside a FreeBSD Jail with Wine installed into it is pretty neat. Initially, I thought this was going to be a pretty difficult and require a lot of trial and error but I was surprised at how easy it was to get this all working. I was really happy to get some of my favorite games working in a FreeBSD Jail, and having ZFS snapshots around was a great way to test things in case I needed to backtrack. ↫ Pertho at their blog No, this isn’t as easy as gaming on Linux has become, and it certainly requires a ton more work and knowledge than just installing a major Linux distribution and Steam, but for those of us who prefer a more traditional UNIX-like experience, this is a great option.
What if you are forced to use Windows, but want to use a real operating system instead? You could use WSL2 to use Linux inside Windows, but what if FreeBSD is more your thing? It turns out someone is working on making FreeBSD usable using WSL2. This repository hosts work-in-progress efforts to run FreeBSD inside Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) with minimal to no changes to the FreeBSD base system. The project builds on the open-source components of WSL2 to enable FreeBSD to boot and run seamlessly in a Windows environment. ↫ WSL for FReeBSD GitHub page The project is experimental, and definitely not ready for production use. It’s also important to note that this project is not part of Microsoft or FreeBSD. At this point in time, FreeBSD boots using WSL2 with basic functionality, and work is currently focused on networking, I/O, and process management.
This year, 2025, the KDE Community held its yearly conference in Berlin, Germany. On the way I reinstalled FreeBSD on my Frame.work 13 laptop in another attempt to get KDE Plasma 6 Wayland working. Short story: yes, KDE Plasma 6 Wayland on FreeBSD works. ↫ Adriaan de Groot Adriaan de Groot is a long-time KDE developer and FreeBSD package maintainer, and he’s published a short but detailed guide on setting up a KDE Plasma desktop on FreeBSD using Wayland instead of X11. With the Linux world slowly but finally leaving X11 behind, the BSD world really has little choice but to follow, especially if they want to continue offering the two major desktop environments. Most of KDE and GNOME are focused on Linux, and the BSDs have always kind of tagged along for the ride, and over the coming years that’s going to mean they’ll have to invest more in making Wayland run comfortably on BSD. Of course, the other option would be the KDE and GNOME experience on the BSDs slowly degrading over time, but I think especially FreeBSD is keen to avoid that fate, while OpenBSD and NetBSD seem a bit more hands-off in the desktop space. FreeBSD is investing heavily in its usability as a desktop operating system, and that’s simply going to mean getting Wayland support up to snuff. Not only will KDE and GNOME slowly depend more and more on Wayland, Xorg itself will also become less maintained than it already is. Sometimes, the current just takes you where it’s going.
We removed ads from OSNews. Donate to our fundraiser to ensure our future! But what if your friends and relatives are more interested in FreeBSD than Linux? Well, here we have a detailed guide to setting up a FreeBSD desktop using KDE Plasma and Wayland. Yes, Wayland is available in the BSD world as well, and in a few years I wouldn’t be surprised to see most FreeBSD desktop guides – including the documentation from FreeBSD itself – to primarily advise using Wayland over X11, as Wayland support in FreeBSD improve even further. I’m sure this will upset nobody.
Becoming friendlier to desktop users is one of the goals of the FreeBSD project at the moment, as we recently saw with the new ability to install a full KDE Plasma desktop environment during FreeBSD’s initial installation. This is just one small piece of a larger effort, though, to improve, modernise, and possibly even replace the current FreeBSD installer entirely. As such, Pierre Pronchery, a Security Engineer for the FreeBSD Foundation and member of their team as a Userland Software Developer, published a blog post today with more information around this effort. The article goes into great detail to compare the installation procedures of other operating systems to that of FreeBSD, and the conclusion is that FreeBSD is lagging behind in quite a few areas. Among other shortcomings, the FreeBSD installer has no support for different languages, very little accessibility features, no niceties like progress bars or lists of steps, and most notably, no graphical mode. Some of these are already being addressed. The current FreeBSD installer (a combination of bsddialog, bsdconfig, and bsdinstall) consists of a number of shell scripts with some small C programs here and there, and the downside of this is that this is really only suitable for creating very basic steps and user interfaces. As an example, Pronchery mentions values during network setup, like network mask, DNS server or gateway, can’t be prepopulated with the most likely values, which puts quite a burden on the user. This specific issue is being worked on by one of the original creators of bsddialog, and the solution they settled on is adding Lua scripting, which would give developers an avenue to fix some of these shortcomings. As far as a possible graphical installer goes, Pronchery looked at the various options out there, both from the Linux world and the few graphical installers that exist for a few desktop-oriented FreeBSD distributions, but for a variety of reasons, none of them proved to be particularly suitable for FreeBSD. As such, Pronchery created a quick proof-of-concept for a graphical installer by implementing bsddialog as a GTK+ application which he calls gbsddialog. It’s important to note that this proof-of-concept is not suitable for FreeBSD, as GTK+ is licensed under the LGPL, but it does illustrate that by “simply” reimplenting bsddialog using a graphical toolkit, you can get quite a long way to a usable FreeBSD installer that mimics the traditional installer quite well. The article covers a number of other topics, such as setting up a development environment to make it more straightforward and easier to work on the FreeBSD installer, as well as various steps that need to be taken to improve the accessibility of the installer. It concludes with a mention of the possibility of a complete rewrite of the installer, but such decisions are of course not made by a single person and require a lot more discussion and input. Regardless, the amount of work being done to improve FreeBSD for generic desktop use is exciting, as we need a viable, competitive alternative to that other open source desktop operating system.
One of the things lacking from the FreeBSD installation routine is the easy installation of a full desktop experience, from X11 all the way up to a login manager, desktop environment, and its applications. It seems this might finally change for FreeBSD 15.0, as the FreeBSD Foundation’s Laptop Support and Usability Improvements project is working on adding support for this to bsdinstall, the FreeBSD installer. Based on a goal set out in this GitHub issue, the way this will work is that through a set of dialogs (which you can check out on GitLab) in the FreeBSD installer, the user can select to install KDE, which will then guide the user through installing the correct graphics driver and adding users to the video group. Once the installation is finished, the computer will reboot and load directly into SDDM, allowing you to log into the installed KDE Plasma desktop environment. For FreeBSD 15.0, our goal is to extend the FreeBSD installer to offer a minimal KDE-based desktop as an install option. The initial concept is a low-interaction installation process that, upon completion, brings the user directly to a KDE graphical login screen. ↫ FreeBSD Foundation Laptop Update – June 2025 Future plans for desktop users in the FreeBSD installers are more elaborate, and will include additional desktop environments to choose from, the ability to install sets of desktop applications during FreeBSD’s installation, and yes, even opting for Wayland instead of X11, because FreeBSD developers know which way the wind is blowing. This is excellent news, and will make installing a FreeBSD-based desktop a lot easier for a ton of people. Work isn’t fully completed just yet, but even if the developers miss their FreeBSD 15.0 target, it’ll just move on to one of the follow-up releases.
FreeBSD 14.3 has been released, an important point release for those of us using the FreeBSD 14.x branch. This release brings 802.11ac (Wi-Fi 5) support to many modern laptop wireless chips, OCI container images are now available in Docker and GitHub repositories, and a number of cornerstone packages have been updated to their latest versions.
This article isn’t meant to be technical. Instead, it offers a high-level view of what happened through the years with GhostBSD, where the project stands today, and where we want to take it next. As you may know, GhostBSD is a user-friendly desktop BSD operating system built with FreeBSD. Its mission is to deliver a simple, stable, and accessible desktop experience for users who want FreeBSD’s power without the complexity of manual setup. I started this journey as a non-technical user. I dreamed of a BSD that anyone could use. ↫ Eric Turgeon at the FreeBSD Foundation’s website I’m very glad to see this article published on the website of the FreeBSD Foundation. I firmly believe that especially FreeBSD has all the components to become an excellent desktop alternative to desktop Linux distributions, especially now that the Linux world is moving fast with certain features and components not everyone likes. FreeBSD could serve as a valid alternative. GhostBSD plays an important role in this. It offers not just an easily installable FreeBSD desktop, but also several tools to make managing such an installation easier, like in-house graphical user interfaces for managing Wi-Fi and other networks, backups, updates, installing software, and more. They also recently moved from UFS to ZFS, and intend to develop graphical tools to expose ZFS’s features to users. GhostBSD can always use more contributors, so if you have the skills, interest, and time, do give it a go.
A complete guide to configuring FreeBSD as an audiophile audio server: setting up system and audio subsystem parameters, real-time operation, bit-perfect signal processing, and the best methods for enabling and parameterising the system graphic equalizer (equalizer) and high-quality audio equalization with FFmpeg filters. Linux users will also find useful information, especially in the context of configuring and personalising the MPD player and filters. ↫ Marcin Szewczyk-Wilgan FreeBSD is a much more capable desktop and workstation operating system than it gets credit for, especially with the Linux world sucking all the air out of the room, but you do often need to do a little more and dive a little deeper into the operating system to get it to do what you want. In the case of audio, Szewczyk-Wilgan explains that he thinks it’s even ahead of Linux, due to being able to “precisely track the parameters of the audio device along with the system kernel parameters and modify them”, as well as FreeBSD having better support for real-time operation. This guide is an incredibly detailed explanation of which options and configurations you should use in FreeBSD to turn it into an audio server. This clearly isn’t for everyone, and I assume most audio experts won’t be considering FreeBSD, but what this article demonstrates is that it’s very, very much possible to do so.
14.2-RELEASE now includes OCI-compatible images, and the Podman toolkit on FreeBSD is ready to use them, on both amd64 and arm64 systems. ↫ Dave Cottlehuber This article from Dave Cottlehuber goes into more detail about the OCI-compatible FreeBSD images and how to use them.
FreeBSD 14.2 has been released, and as the version number suggests, this isn’t a major release with huge changes. Still, it does bring support for downloading and installing necessary firmware packages after installation, the latest versions of OpenZFS and OpenSSL, and much more. FreeBSD 14.2 is available for the main architectures it supports – x86, PowerPC/POWER, ARM, and RISC-V, and can be downloaded from the usual location.
Another excellent guide from friend of the website Stefano Marinelli. A client of mine has several Windows Server VMs, which I had not migrated to FreeBSD/bhyve until a few weeks ago. These VMs were originally installed with the traditional BIOS boot mode, not UEFI, on Proxmox. Fortunately, their virtual disks are on ZFS, which allowed me to test and achieve the final result in just a few steps. This is because Windows VMs (server or otherwise) often installed on KVM (Proxmox, etc.), especially older ones, are non-UEFI, using the traditional BIOS boot mode. bhyve doesn’t support this setup, but Windows allows changing the boot mode, and I could perform the migration directly on the target FreeBSD server. ↫ Stefano Marinelli I link to guides like these because finding such detailed guides born out of experience, written by actual humans with actual experience – instead of bots on content farms – is remarkably hard. There’s more than enough similar content like this out there covering Windows or popular Linux distributions like Red Hat, but the BSDs tend to fall a bit short here. As such, promoting people writing such content is something I’ll happily do. Marinelli also happens to host the Matrix server (as part of his BSD Cafe effort) that houses the OSNews Matrix room, accessible by becoming an OSNews Patreon.
quBSD is a FreeBSD jails/bhyve wrapper which implements a Qubes inspired containerization schema. Written in shell, based on zfs, and uses the underlying FreeBSD tools. ↫ quBSD GitHub page quBSD really seems to build upon the best FreeBSD has to offer. Neat.
It’s the start of the work week, so for the IT administrators among us, I have another great article by friend of the website, Stefano Marinelli. This article covers migrating a Proxmox-based setup to FreeBSD with bhyve. The load is not particularly high, and the machines have good performance. Suddenly, however, I received a notification: one of the NVMe drives died abruptly, and the server rebooted. ZFS did its job, and everything remained sufficiently secure, but since it’s a leased server and already several years old, I spoke with the client and proposed getting more recent hardware and redoing the setup based on a FreeBSD host. ↫ Stefano Marinelli If you’re interested in moving one of your own setups, or one of your clients’ setups, from Linux to FreeBSD, this is a great place to start and get some ideas, tips, and tricks. Like I said, it’s Monday, and you need to get to work.
When I think about bhyve Live Migration, it’s something I encounter almost daily in my consulting calls. VMware’s struggles with Broadcom’s licensing issues have been a frequent topic, even as we approach the end of 2024. It’s surprising that many customers still feel uncertain about how to navigate this mess. While VMware has been a mainstay in enterprise environments for years, these ongoing issues make customers nervous. And they should be – it’s hard to rely on something when even the licensing situation feels volatile. Now, as much as I’m a die-hard FreeBSD fan, I have to admit that FreeBSD still falls short when it comes to virtualization – at least from an enterprise perspective. In these environments, it’s not just about running a VM; it’s about having the flexibility and capabilities to manage workloads without interruption. Years ago, open-source solutions like KVM (e.g., Proxmox) and Xen (e.g., XCP-ng) introduced features like live migration, where you can move VMs between hosts with zero downtime. Even more recently, solutions like SUSE Harvester (utilizing KubeVirt for running VMs) have shown that this is now an essential part of any virtualization ecosystem. ↫ gyptazy FreeBSD has bhyve, but the part where it falls short, according to gyptazy, is the tool’s lack of live migration. While competitors and alternatives allow for virtual machines to be migrated without downtime, bhyve users still need to shut down their VMs, interrupt all connections, and thus experience a period of downtime before everything is back up and running again. This is simply not acceptable in most enterprise environments, and as such, bhyve is not an option for most users of that type. Luckily for enterprise FreeBSD users, things are improving. Live migration of bhyve virtual machines is being worked on, and basic live migration is now supported, but with limitations. For instance, only virtual machines with a maximum of 3GB could be migrated live, but that limit has been raised in recent years to 13 to 14GB, which is a lot more palatable. There are also some issues with memory corruption, as well as some other issues. Still, it’s a massive feat to have live migration at all, and it seems to be improving every year. The linked article goes into much greater detail about where things stand, so if you’re interested in keeping up with the latest progress regarding bhyve’s live migration capabilities, it’s a great place to start.
For nearly 15 years, FreeBSD has been at the core of my personal infrastructure, and my passion for it has only grown over time. As a die-hard fan, I’ve stuck with BSD-based systems because they continue to deliver exactly what I need—storage, networking, and security—without missing a beat. The features I initially fell in love with, like ZFS, jails, and pf, are still rock-solid and irreplaceable. There’s no need to overhaul them, and in many ways, that reliability is what keeps me hooked. My scripts from 20 years ago still work, and that’s a rare kind of stability that few platforms can boast. It’s not just me, either—big names like Netflix, Microsoft, and NetApp, alongside companies like Tailscale and AMD, continue to support FreeBSD, further reinforcing my belief in its strength and longevity (you can find the donators and sponsors right here). Yet, while this familiarity is comforting, it’s becoming clear that FreeBSD must evolve to keep pace with the modern landscape of computing. ↫ gyptazy It’s good to read so many articles and comments from long-time FreeBSD users and contributors who seem to recognise that there’s a real opportunity for FreeBSD to become more than ‘just’ a solid server operating system. This aligns neatly with FreeBSD itself recognising this, too, and investing in improving the operating system’s support for what are not considered basic laptop features like touchpad gestures and advanced sleep states, among other things. I’ve long held the belief that the BSDs are far closer to attracting a wider, more general computing-focused audience than even they themselves sometimes seem to think. There’s a real, tangible benefit to the way BSDs are developed and structured – a base system developed by one team – compared to the Linux world, and there’s enough disgruntlement among especially longtime Linux users about things like Wayland and systemd that there’s a pool of potential users to attract that didn’t exist only a few years ago. If you’re a little unsure about the future of Linux – give one of the BSDs a try. There’s a real chance you’ll love it.
