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FreeBSD Leftovers
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Daemonology ☛ A year of funded FreeBSD
Following FreeBSD's quarterly release schedule (which I announced in July 2024, but put together and presented at the FreeBSD developer summit at BSDCan in May 2024), I managed four FreeBSD releases during the past year: FreeBSD 13.4, in September 2024; FreeBSD 14.2, in December 2024; FreeBSD 13.5, in March 2025; and FreeBSD 14.3, currently scheduled for release on June 10th. The work involved in manging each of these releases — nagging developers to get their code into the tree in time, approving (or disapproving!) merge requests, coordinating with other teams, building and testing images (usually three Betas, one Release Candidate, and the final Release), writing announcement text, and fixing any release-building breakage which arose along the way — mostly happened in the month prior to the release (I refer to the second month of each calendar quarter as "Beta Month") and ranged from a low of 33.5 hours (for FreeBSD 13.5) to a high of 79 hours (for FreeBSD 14.2). As one might imagine, the later in a stable branch you get, the fewer the number of things there are breaking and the lower the amount of work required for doing a release; while I wasn't tracking hours when I managed FreeBSD 14.1, I suspect it took close to 100 hours of release engineering time, and FreeBSD 15.0 is very likely to be well over that.
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FreeBSD ☛ Three Ways to Try FreeBSD in Under Five Minutes
With FreeBSD interest on the rise, here at The Foundation we couldn’t help wondering “just how fast can you get started?” The obvious path is to use the standard installer. But did you know the Project’s release engineering team also prepares ready-to-use virtual machine images — making it possible to launch FreeBSD in just minutes?
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FreeBSD ☛ April 2025 Laptop Support and Usability Project Update
The FreeBSD Foundation’s Laptop Support and Usability Project continued to make steady progress in April. The report is now available on Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub . Highlights include: Improved Wireless Support: Updated Realtek (rtw88/rtw89) drivers are now in main and coming in 14.3, along with improved TKIP Wi-Fi performance.