FreeBSD 1

Released in November 1993. 1.1.5.1 was released in July 1994.

FreeBSD 2

2.0-RELEASE was announced on 22 November 1994. The final release of FreeBSD 2, 2.2.8-RELEASE, was announced on 29 November 1998. FreeBSD 2.0 was the first version of FreeBSD to be claimed legally free of AT&T

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

code with approval of

Novell Novell, Inc. () was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi-platform network operating system known as NetWare. Novell technolog ...

. It was the first version to be widely used at the beginnings of the spread of Internet servers. 2.2.9-RELEASE was released April 1, 2006 as a fully functional

April Fools' Day April Fools' Day or April Fool's Day (rarely called All Fools' Day) is an annual custom on the 1st of April consisting of practical jokes, hoaxes, and pranks. Jokesters often expose their actions by shouting "April Fool " at the recipient. ...

prank.

FreeBSD 3

FreeBSD 3.0-RELEASE was announced on 16 October 1998. The final release, 3.5-RELEASE, was announced on 24 June 2000. FreeBSD 3.0 was the first branch able to support

symmetric multiprocessing Symmetric multiprocessing or shared-memory multiprocessing (SMP) involves a multiprocessor computer hardware and software architecture where two or more identical processors are connected to a single, shared main memory, have full access to all ...

(SMP) systems, using a Giant lock and marked the transition from a.out to

ELF An elf (: elves) is a type of humanoid supernatural being in Germanic peoples, Germanic folklore. Elves appear especially in Norse mythology, North Germanic mythology, being mentioned in the Icelandic ''Poetic Edda'' and the ''Prose Edda'' ...

executables.

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard, developed by USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), for digital data transmission and power delivery between many types of electronics. It specifies the architecture, in particular the physical ...

support was first introduced with FreeBSD 3.1, and the first

Gigabit The bit is the most basic unit of information in computing and digital communication. The name is a portmanteau of binary digit. The bit represents a logical state with one of two possible values. These values are most commonly represented as ...

network cards were supported in 3.2-RELEASE.

FreeBSD 4

4.0-RELEASE appeared in March 2000 and the last 4-STABLE branch release was 4.11 in January 2005 supported until 31 January 2007. FreeBSD 4 was lauded for its stability, was a favorite operating system for ISPs and web hosting providers during the first

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (or dot-com boom) was a stock market bubble that ballooned during the late-1990s and peaked on Friday, March 10, 2000. This period of market growth coincided with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web and the Interne ...

, and is widely regarded as one of the most stable and high-performance operating systems of the whole Unix lineage. Among the new features of FreeBSD 4, kqueue(2) was introduced (which is now part of other major BSD systems) and Jails, a way of running processes in separate environments. Version 4.8 was forked by Matt Dillon to create

DragonFly BSD DragonFly BSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system forked from FreeBSD 4.8. Matthew Dillon, an Amiga developer in the late 1980s and early 1990s and FreeBSD developer between 1994 and 2003, began working on DragonFly BSD in ...

FreeBSD 5

After almost three years of development, the first 5.0-RELEASE in January 2003 was widely anticipated, featuring support for advanced multiprocessor and application threading, and for the

UltraSPARC The UltraSPARC is a microprocessor developed by Sun Microsystems and fabricated by Texas Instruments, introduced in mid-1995. It is the first microprocessor from Sun to implement the 64-bit SPARC V9 instruction set architecture (ISA). Marc Tre ...

and

IA-64 IA-64 (Intel Itanium architecture) is the instruction set architecture (ISA) of the discontinued Itanium family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors. The basic ISA specification originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was subsequently implemented by ...

platforms. The first 5-STABLE release was 5.3 (5.0 through 5.2.1 were cut from ''-CURRENT''). The last release from the 5-STABLE branch was 5.5 in May 2006. The largest architectural development in FreeBSD 5 was a major change in the low-level kernel locking mechanisms to enable better symmetric multi-processor (SMP) support. This released much of the kernel from the MP lock, which is sometimes called the '' Giant lock''. More than one process could now execute in kernel mode at the same time. Other major changes included an ''M'':''N'' native threading implementation called Kernel Scheduled Entities (KSE). In principle this is similar to

Scheduler Activations Scheduler activations are a threading mechanism that, when implemented in an operating system's process scheduler, provide kernel-level thread functionality with user-level thread flexibility and performance. This mechanism uses a so-called "N:M ...

. Starting with FreeBSD 5.3, KSE was the default threading implementation until it was replaced with a 1:1 implementation in FreeBSD 7.0. FreeBSD 5 also significantly changed the block I/O layer by implementing the GEOM modular disk I/O request transformation framework contributed by Poul-Henning Kamp. GEOM enables the simple creation of many kinds of functionality, such as

mirroring Mirroring is the behavior in which one person subconsciously imitates the gesture, idiolect, speech pattern, or attitude of another. Mirroring often occurs in social situations, particularly in the company of close friends or family, often going ...

(gmirror), encryption ( GBDE and GELI). This work was supported through sponsorship by

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adva ...

. While the early versions from the 5.x were not much more than developer previews, with pronounced instability, the 5.4 and 5.5 releases of FreeBSD confirmed the technologies introduced in the FreeBSD 5.x branch had a future in highly stable and high-performing releases.

FreeBSD 6

FreeBSD 6.0 was released on 4 November 2005. The final FreeBSD 6 release was 6.4, on 11 November 2008. These versions extended work on SMP and threading optimization along with more work on advanced 802.11 functionality, TrustedBSD security event auditing, significant network stack performance enhancements, a fully preemptive kernel and support for hardware performance counters (HWPMC). The main accomplishments of these releases include removal of the Giant lock from VFS, implementation of a better-performing optional libthr

library A library is a collection of Book, books, and possibly other Document, materials and Media (communication), media, that is accessible for use by its members and members of allied institutions. Libraries provide physical (hard copies) or electron ...

with 1:1 threading and the addition of a Basic Security Module (BSM) audit implementation called OpenBSM, which was created by the TrustedBSD Project (based on the BSM implementation found in Apple's

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

Darwin) and released under a BSD-style license.

FreeBSD 7

FreeBSD 7.0 was released on 27 February 2008. The final FreeBSD 7 release was 7.4, on 24 February 2011. New features included

SCTP The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a computer networking communications protocol in the transport layer of the Internet protocol suite. Originally intended for Signaling System 7 (SS7) message transport in telecommunication, the ...

, UFS journaling, an experimental port of

Sun The Sun is the star at the centre of the Solar System. It is a massive, nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core, radiating the energy from its surface mainly as visible light a ...

ZFS ZFS (previously Zettabyte File System) is a file system with Volume manager, volume management capabilities. It began as part of the Sun Microsystems Solaris (operating system), Solaris operating system in 2001. Large parts of Solaris, includin ...

file system, GCC4, improved support for the ARM

architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and construction, constructi ...

, jemalloc (a memory allocator optimized for parallel computation, which was ported to Firefox 3), and major updates and optimizations relating to network, audio, and SMP performance. Benchmarks showed significant performance improvements compared to previous FreeBSD releases as well as Linux. The new ULE scheduler was much improved but a decision was made to ship the 7.0 release with the older 4BSD scheduler, leaving ULE as a kernel compile-time tunable. In FreeBSD 7.1 ULE was the default for the i386 and AMD64 architectures.

DTrace DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework originally created by Sun Microsystems for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time. Originally developed for Solaris, it has since been released un ...

support was integrated in version 7.1, and

NetBSD NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was fork (software development), forked. It continues to ...

and FreeBSD 7.2 brought support for multi-IPv4/IPv6 jails. Code supporting the

DEC Alpha Alpha (original name Alpha AXP) is a 64-bit reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Alpha was designed to replace 32-bit VAX complex instruction set computers ( ...

architecture (supported since FreeBSD 4.0) was removed in FreeBSD 7.0.

FreeBSD 8

FreeBSD 8.0 was officially released on 25 November 2009. FreeBSD 8 was branched from the trunk in August 2009. It features superpages, Xen DomU support, network stack virtualization, stack-smashing protection, TTY layer rewrite, much updated and improved

support, a new

stack with USB 3.0 and xHCI support added in FreeBSD 8.2,

multicast In computer networking, multicast is a type of group communication where data transmission is addressed to a group of destination computers simultaneously. Multicast can be one-to-many or many-to-many distribution. Multicast differs from ph ...

updates including IGMPv3, a rewritten NFS client/server introducing NFSv4, and AES acceleration on supported Intel CPUs (added in FreeBSD 8.2). Inclusion of improved device mmap() extensions enables implementation of a 64-bit Nvidia display driver for the x86-64 platform. A pluggable congestion control framework, and support for the ability to use

for applications running under Linux emulation were added in FreeBSD 8.3. FreeBSD 8.4, released on 7 June 2013, was the final release from the FreeBSD 8 series.

FreeBSD 9

FreeBSD 9.0 was released on 12 January 2012. Key features of the release include a new installer (bsdinstall), UFS journaling,

version 28, userland DTrace, NFSv4-compatible NFS server and client, USB 3.0 support, support for running on the

PlayStation 3 The PlayStation 3 (PS3) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE). It is the successor to the PlayStation 2, and both are part of the PlayStation brand of consoles. The PS3 was first released on ...

, Capsicum sandboxing, and LLVM 3.0 in the base system. The kernel and base system could be built with

Clang Clang () is a compiler front end for the programming languages C, C++, Objective-C, Objective-C++, and the software frameworks OpenMP, OpenCL, RenderScript, CUDA, SYCL, and HIP. It acts as a drop-in replacement for the GNU Compiler ...

, but FreeBSD 9.0 still used GCC4.2 by default. The

PlayStation 4 The PlayStation 4 (PS4) is a home video game console developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Announced as the successor to the PlayStation 3 in February 2013, it was launched on November 15, 2013, in North America, November 29, 2013, in ...

video game console uses a derived version of FreeBSD 9.0, which

Sony Computer Entertainment Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC (SIE) is an American video game and digital entertainment company that is a major subsidiary of Japanese conglomerate Sony, Sony Group Corporation. It primarily operates the PlayStation brand of video game co ...

dubbed "Orbis OS". FreeBSD 9.1 was released on 31 December 2012. FreeBSD 9.2 was released on 30 September 2013. FreeBSD 9.3 was released on 16 July 2014.

FreeBSD 10

On 20 January 2014, the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team announced the availability of FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE. Key features include the deprecation of GCC in favor of

, a new

iSCSI Internet Small Computer Systems Interface or iSCSI ( ) is an Internet Protocol-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities. iSCSI provides block-level access to storage devices by carrying SCSI commands over a TCP/IP ...

implementation, VirtIO drivers for out-of-the-box KVM support, and a FUSE implementation. ;FreeBSD 10.1: ''Long Term Support Release'' ''FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE'' was announced 14 November 2014, and was supported for an extended term until 31 December 2016. The subsequent 10.2-RELEASE reached EoL on the same day. In October 2017 the 10.4-RELEASE (final release of this branch) was announced, and support for the 10 series was terminated in October 2018.

FreeBSD 11

On 10 October 2016, the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team announced the availability of FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE.

FreeBSD 12

FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE was announced in December 2018.

FreeBSD 13

* FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE was published on 13 April 2021. * FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE was published on 16 May 2022. * FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE was published on 11 April 2023. * FreeBSD 13.3-RELEASE was published on 5 March 2024. * FreeBSD 13.4-RELEASE was published on 17 September 2024. * FreeBSD 13.5-RELEASE was published on 11 March 2025. FreeBSD 13.x is the last release cycle to support

MIPS architecture MIPS (Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipelined Stages) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures (ISA)Price, Charles (September 1995). ''MIPS IV Instruction Set'' (Revision 3.2), MIPS Technologies ...

based CPUs.

FreeBSD 14

* FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE was published on 20 November 2023. * FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE was published on 4 June 2024. * FreeBSD 14.2-RELEASE was published on 3 December 2024. * FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE is scheduled for release in June 2025. * FreeBSD 14.4-RELEASE is scheduled for release in March 2026. * FreeBSD 14.5-RELEASE is scheduled for release in September 2026. * FreeBSD 14.6-RELEASE is scheduled for release in March 2027. FreeBSD 14.x is the last release cycle to support 32 bit CPU architectures except armv7.

FreeBSD 15

* FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE will be released in December 2025. * FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE will be released in June 2026. * FreeBSD 15.2-RELEASE will be released in December 2026. * FreeBSD 15.3-RELEASE will be released in June 2027. FreeBSD 15.x release cycle only supports the following platforms/architectures:

FreeBSD 16

FreeBSD 16.0-RELEASE will be released in December 2027.

Version history

The following table presents a version release history for the

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free-software Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable ...

operating system.

Timeline

The timeline shows that the span of a single release generation of FreeBSD lasts around 5 years. Since the FreeBSD project makes effort for binary backward (and limited forward) compatibility within the same release generation, this allows users 5+ years of support, with trivial-to-easy upgrading within the release generation.

References

{{FreeBSD FreeBSD History of free and open-source software Lists of operating systems Software version histories