FreeBSD: Shorter support for the professional focus

Colin Percival, who took over as Head of FreeBSD Release Engineering in November 2023, has announced two important changes to the release engineering process of the free operating system. The schedule for new FreeBSD versions is to be made more predictable and thus easier to plan, especially for commercial use, by setting long advance dates. In addition, the support period for a major release will be reduced from five to four years; an LTS version is not planned. The new features will apply from FreeBSD 15.0, which will be released in December 2025. There is a transitional solution for the current versions 13.x and 14.x with the previous five years of support.

Support for FreeBSD 13 will therefore end in March 2025 with the 13.5 release, for FreeBSD 14 in March 2027 with version 14.6 and for FreeBSD 15 in March 2029 with 15.6. The last minor version of each release is now version x.6, as there will always be combined updates and therefore a new version at the end of each quarter. With a two-year support cycle, this results in six further minor releases after the .0 release.

Relief for the FreeBSD team

The streamlining and fixed scheduling and, according to Colin Percival, better communication between the release engineering team and the developers should make it possible to reduce the previous three to four BETAs to three and the release candidates (RC) from three to six to just one. The pressure to introduce a new feature into the FreeBSD system should be reduced: it will now only take three months instead of up to six months until the next minor release. The shortening of the support period to four years is intended to relieve the security team, which would have to manage up to three releases with five years of support and one release every four years. However, Percival admits that the dates could be postponed in the event of critical errors.

In concrete terms, the planning for releases and EoL (End of Life) for FreeBSD looks like this:

Effects in practice

Until now, FreeBSD administrators could view the schedule for new releases on the project page under FreeBSD Security Information. Important announcements and thus also new releases and advance warnings about the EoL were received via e-mail from the "freebsd-announce@FreeBSD.org" mailing list. The FreeBSD update tool freebsd-update(8), started nightly via crontab(5), downloaded updates when available, sent an e-mail to the administrator and pointed out possible new releases or an upcoming EoL. This will also be possible in the future. For smaller installations, the new cycle may mean little or no changeover effort, but desktop and notebook users may receive the latest hardware drivers sooner. The new predictability will certainly be well received in the professional IT environment - a particular focus of Colin Percival, as he is also the maintainer of the FreeBSD-EC2 platform.

All information on the changes can be found in the announcement.

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