FreeBSD The Power to Serve

FreeBSD Status Report Second Quarter 2025

Here is the second 2025 status report, with 32 entries.

As for the preceding quarters, this report is published just a few days before calls for 2025Q3 report submissions are sent. Indeed, although according to our timeline we should have published this report in July (general rule is publication should happen within the month just after the calls for reports are sent), we kept receiving important reports until the end of August. This is both a positive and a negative thing. On one hand, it means that our FreeBSD community is busy fixing existing issues and implementing new features, making the OS we love better and better every day; it means that the community works so intensely that very little time remains for reporting. On the other hand, it means that news in these reports is always two months old when published. Two months is not bad, especially if we consider that FreeBSD communication happens on many other channels too, but it would be nice if we could improve it.

If you are a late submitter, please take some time to evaluate if there is anything you can do to improve your report submission punctuality. The Status Team is always glad to ease the submission process: if there is something we can do for you, just ask. If you are a contributor or just a FreeBSD user, please consider contributing more, if you can. Even working on a single small simple task is useful, it can help to lower the pressure on other developers, for whom it might thus become easier to find the time to document their work.

Have a nice reading!

Lorenzo Salvadore, on behalf of the Status Team.

FreeBSD Team Reports

Entries from the various official and semi-official teams, as found in the Administration Page.

FreeBSD Core Team

Contact: FreeBSD Core Team <core@FreeBSD.org>

The FreeBSD Core Team is the governing body of FreeBSD.

Project roadmap

Core is collecting ideas and comments to draft Project’s roadmap. It is an item core.13 thinks is worth to continue from core.12. The roadmap is not about restricting or limiting what developers and contributors can do, but about the compiled goals and expectations of the Project and things the community can collaborate on. It will also let the FreeBSD Foundation help the Project more effectively, so, this is an important discussion item for the meetings between core and the FreeBSD Foundation.

Policy on generative AI created code and documentation

Core is investigating setting up a policy for LLM/AI usage (including but not limited to generating code). The result will be added to the Contributors Guide in the doc repository. AI can be useful for translations (which seems faster than doing the work manually), explaining long/obscure documents, tracking down bugs, or helping to understand large code bases. We currently tend to not use it to generate code because of license concerns. The discussion continues at the core session at BSDCan 2025 developer summit, and core is still collecting feedback and working on the policy.

Work in Progress

Core is currently working on the following items:

  • Core and the FreeBSD Foundation are working on the 2025 edition of the Community survey

  • Privacy-friendly web analytics, proposed by the Foundation. An idea is to compare traffic flows between freebsd.org and freebsdfoundation.org

FreeBSD Foundation

Links:
FreeBSD Foundation URL: https://freebsdfoundation.org/
Technology Roadmap URL: https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/technology-roadmap/
Donate URL: https://freebsdfoundation.org/donate/
Foundation Partnership Program URL: https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/freebsd-foundation-partnership-program/
FreeBSD Journal URL: https://freebsdfoundation.org/journal/
Foundation Events URL: https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/events/

Contact: Deb Goodkin <deb@FreeBSDFoundation.org>

The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to advancing FreeBSD through both technical and non-technical support. Funded entirely by donations, the Foundation supports software development, infrastructure, security, and collaboration efforts; organizes events and developer summits; provides educational resources; and represents the FreeBSD Project in legal matters.

Here are some of the ways we supported FreeBSD in the second quarter of 2025.

Advocacy

Advocacy work in the 2nd quarter of 2025 included hosting events, launching a new series of video guides and bringing on a new Marketing Coordinator. Florine Kamdem brings social media, branding, and IT skills. She uses storytelling to craft digital campaigns that spark interest and build connection within the community. Read more about Florine, and check out just a few of the ways the Foundation helped advocate for FreeBSD in Q2 of 2025:

OS Improvements

The Foundation continued to support two major initiatives: the Laptop Support and Usability project (in collaboration with Quantum Leap Research) and an infrastructure modernization project commissioned by the Sovereign Tech Agency. For background on both efforts, see the 2025Q1 quarterly status report.

Throughout the quarter, there were 536 src, 64 ports, and 41 doc commits that identified the FreeBSD Foundation as a sponsor.

Here is a sampling of that work and other sponsored efforts:

  • Various improvements to libvirt’s support for bhyve, including:

    • An initial port of the libvirt integration testing project, libvirt-tck, enabling test execution against libvirt’s bhyve driver on FreeBSD.

    • Enhancements to the bhyve driver to improve compatibility and testability.

    • Support for virtio-rnd devices, NVRAM configuration, and extended domain usage statistics (under review).

    • Initial support for pf(4)-based NAT networking (under review).

  • Improved handling of tlsbase (thread-local storage) on amd64, making it more reliable across context switches and benefiting applications that manually manage TLS, such as Wine.

  • Runtime linker improvements, including support for the -z initfirst flag. This addresses longstanding issues with RTLD_DEEPBIND and provides better control over symbol resolution and initialization order in dynamically linked applications.

  • Enhanced ptrace usability by enabling transient PT_ATTACH behavior. This reduces friction for debugging tools and eliminates spurious EINTR errors that could interrupt or break tracing workflows.

  • kqueue introspection support by extending procstat(1) to report kqueue state, improving observability into how processes use kernel event notification mechanisms

  • Design and implementation of EXTERROR, a mechanism that reports extended error information to userspace, augmenting the usual errno value. This enables applications to retrieve more detailed diagnostics beyond standard error codes.

Other sponsored efforts are covered in separate report entries:

The Foundation is managing FreeBSD’s participation in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program. Twelve projects were accepted this year.

Continuous Integration and Workflow Improvement

As part of our continued support of the FreeBSD Project, the Foundation supports a full-time staff member dedicated to improving the Project’s continuous integration system and test infrastructure.

Legal/FreeBSD IP

The Foundation owns the FreeBSD trademarks, and it is our responsibility to protect them. We also provide legal support for the core team to investigate questions that arise.

Go to https://freebsdfoundation.org to find more about how we support FreeBSD and how we can help you!

FreeBSD Release Engineering Team

Links:
FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE announcement URL: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.3R/announce/
FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE schedule URL: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/15.0R/schedule/
FreeBSD releases URL: https://download.freebsd.org/releases/ISO-IMAGES/
FreeBSD development snapshots URL: https://download.freebsd.org/snapshots/ISO-IMAGES/

Contact: FreeBSD Release Engineering Team, <re@FreeBSD.org>

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is responsible for setting and publishing release schedules for official project releases of FreeBSD, announcing code freezes and maintaining the respective branches, among other things.

The Team managed 14.3-RELEASE, leading to the official RELEASE build and announcement in June. Planning has started for the upcoming 15.0-RELEASE, which is due to arrive in December.

The OCI Container Images built by the Release Engineering Team are now being uploaded to Docker and GitHub repositories in addition to being available on the FreeBSD download site.

The Team gained a new member, Jake Freeland, and three members have departed: Konstantin Belousov, John Hixson, Doug Rabson. We thank them for their contributions.

The Release Engineering Team continued providing weekly development snapshot builds for the main, stable/14, and stable/13 branches.

Ports Collection

Links:
About FreeBSD Ports URL:https://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/
Contributing to Ports URL: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/contributing/#ports-contributing
Ports Management Team URL: https://www.freebsd.org/portmgr/
Ports Tarball URL: http://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/ports/

Contact: Tobias C. Berner <portmgr-secretary@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: FreeBSD Ports Management Team <portmgr@FreeBSD.org>

The Ports Management Team is responsible for overseeing the overall direction of the Ports Tree, building packages, and personnel matters. Below is what happened in the last quarter.

During the last quarter, we welcomed Älven (alven@) and Jesús Daniel Colmenares Oviedo (dtxdf@) as new ports committers, and said goodbye to one committer.

According to INDEX, there are currently 36,605 (up from 36,450) ports in the Ports Collection. There are currently about 3,330 (down from 3,333) open ports PRs, of which 832 are unassigned. The last quarter saw 10,294 (down from 10,733) commits by 157 (down from 158) committers on the main branch and 770 (up from 707) commits by 56 (up from 54) committers on the 2025Q2 branch.

The most active committers to main were:

A lot has happened in the ports tree in the last three months, an excerpt of the major software upgrades are:

  • pkg 2.2.1

  • Default version of Go switched to 1.24

  • Default version of Lazarus (non-aarch64) switched to 4.0

  • Default version of Linux (non-i386) switched to Rocky Linux 9 (rl9)

  • Default version of Perl switched to 5.40

  • Default version of PostgreSQL switched to 17

  • Default version of Ruby switched to 3.3

  • Chromium 137.0.7151.119

  • Electron 35.* and 36.*

  • Firefox 140.0.2

  • Firefox-esr 128.12.0

  • Gnome 47

  • KDE Plasma 6.4.1

  • KDE Framework 6.15.0

  • Qt6 6.9.1

  • Ruby 3.2.8, 3.3.8, 3.4.4 (new), and 3.5.0-preview1 (new)

  • Rust 1.87.0

  • SDL 2.32.8 and 3.2.16

  • Sway 1.11

  • wlroots 0.19.0 (new)

  • Xorg server 21.1.18

During the last quarter, pkgmgr@ ran 22 exp-runs to test infrastructure changes and various ports upgrades.

Bugmeister Team

Links:
FreeBSD Bugzilla URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Bugzilla

Contact: Bugmeister <bugmeister@FreeBSD.org>

In this quarter we stayed steady-state on the PR count.

Mark Linimon has held some voice chats on the FreeBSD Discord for "Bugmeister Office Hours". The plan is to hold them more regularly and announce them in advance. At the moment the schedule is Mondays at 3pm CDT (1800 UTC).

We still are doing better at triaging PRs than we are generating committer attention to the ones we have triaged. Suggestions welcome.

We have added new search queries about Maintainer Approval (applies to Attachments) and Maintainer Feedback (applies to an entire individual Problem Report). These queries were not easily composable from the various web forms. This work was funded by the FreeBSD Foundation.

Please see the new documentation.

We used these queries to close various PRs, and also to investigate inactive maintainers. As of yet, we have not taken action on the latter.

A problem with the setup of the upgrade to Bugzilla 5.2 has been fixed. Light testing shows no regressions. Switching to this codebase is scheduled for next quarter.

patchQA.py still remains in beta. The patch application code is not up to its task and must be replaced.

The other problem known with patchQA.py is that it does not know the origins of files that are installed into /etc by installworld.

We have created dozens of new Bugzilla accounts by user request.

See also: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Bugzilla/SearchQueries

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

Source Management Team

Contact: srcmgr <srcmgr@FreeBSD.org>

The srcmgr@ team aims to make src developers more productive, and works to manage the large number of bug reports, pull requests and code reviews that we receive. Meeting minutes are available on GitHub.

We held a bug-busting session on 2025-05-23 with about 10 attendees.

Members of srcmgr@ gave a presentation at the 2025 FreeBSD developer summit in Ottawa.

Per the discussion at the developer summit, the i386 and 32-bit powerpc targets have been disconnected from the build.

To help ensure continuity of the team, we introduced a "lurkers" program which lets src committers participate in bi-weekly srcmgr meetings, giving developers an opportunity to decide whether they are interested in officially joining srcmgr@ without taking on any specific obligations. After soliciting interested developers, we have five lurkers who have been joining calls over the past couple of months:

Aside from participating in discussions, they have been working on src development tasks — especially in preparation for FreeBSD 15.0 — and topics such as monitoring stale Phabricator reviews, performance regression tracking, and using git notes to track certain types of commit metadata.

Projects

Projects that span multiple categories, from the kernel and userspace to the Ports Collection or external projects.

Infrastructure Modernization

Contact: Ed Maste <emaste@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Alice Sowerby <alice@freebsdfoundation.org>

The project started in Q3 of 2024 and was commissioned by the Sovereign Tech Agency with a budget of $745,000, to be spent over about one year. The main goals are to improve security tools for the base system, ports, and packages, update the project’s infrastructure to speed up development, enhance build security, and make it easier for new developers to get started.

Q2 update

All five work packages are now in progress and will run until the end of December 2025, at which time the project will close.

Work Package A: Technical Debt reduction

The majority of the work in this work package is complete, with a small number of hours allocated each month to help support FreeBSD Project’s Source Management team to embed their new processes to make bug management easier and more sustainable. The bug backlog dashboard https://grimoire.freebsd.org remains available to help make the backlog easier to understand.

We have also been upgrading Bugzilla by applying patches from 2023 onward and improving the upgrade process to ensure smoother future updates.

A panel discussion at Open Source Summit Europe in August will share this work with a wider audience. Two members of the Foundation project staff will be present, along with two representatives from Bitergia who delivered the GrimoireLab implementation for this project. (Members of the FreeBSD Project Source Management team were not available to attend.)

Progress is being made to reduce technical debt by creating an automated method for evaluating patches (code improvements) attached to existing pull requests for source and ports trees to see whether they are still relevant, and applying them if they are. This tool is in beta.

Work Package B: Zero Trust Builds

This work package intends to improve tooling and processes to support Zero Trust Builds of FreeBSD by extending the current components to enable the project to build release artifacts (package sets, ISO images, etc.) without requiring any special privilege.

The detailed scope was co-created with core@, srcmgr@, secteam@. Work items are as follows:

  • Must

    • No-root for all source release build cases/artifacts (in progress)

    • Src artifacts to build reproducibly (in progress)

    • Formalize and document make world and release.sh (in progress)

  • Should

    • Remove privilege from orchestration tooling (not started)

    • Move build scripts into the public repository (not started)

  • Could

    • Environment Standardization (not started)

    • Ports to build reproducibly (not started)

    • CI to verify reproducibility (in progress)

    • Documentation to allow 3rd parties to confirm reproducibility (not started)

Work Package C: CI/CD Automation

This work package intends to improve CI/CD automation to streamline software delivery and operations for new and existing software by modernizing and securitizing the existing CI/CD system and extending it to cover the third party packages in the FreeBSD Ports Collection.

The detailed scope was co-created with core@, srcmgr@, portmgr@, doceng@.

  • Must

    • Improve quality of incoming commits (completed)

    • Pre-merge CI (completed)

    • Environment Metadata (not started)

    • Extend CI to the Ports tree (in progress)

    • CI Threat Model (not started)

    • CI Management Process (in progress)

    • Documentation (not started)

  • Should

    • 3rd-party Interoperability (in progress)

    • Automated analysis in tests (in progress)

    • Test Case Management (not started)

  • Could

    • Granular Debugging (not started)

Work Package D: Ports and Packages security improvements

This work package intends to modernize and extend security controls in the FreeBSD Ports and Package Collection by:

  • migrating from our VuXML Vulnerability Database to OSV or similar contemporary format

  • developing a package audit backend and server to reliably fetch vulnerability data from global agency databases in any format (JSON - NIST) and produce insight

  • improving CI tooling for FreeBSD Ports.

The detailed scope was co-created with core@, portmgr@, pkgmgr@, secteam@.

  • Must

    • New Database Format (in progress)

    • Set up 2+ Database Instances (not started)

    • Migrate Data from old to new database (in progress)

    • Add support for new format in pkg(8) (in progress)

    • Upstream engagement (not started)

    • SBOM on demand (not started)

    • Document how to set up build and test targets (not started)

    • Integrate 3rd party test targets (not started)

    • Continuous Testing (not started)

  • Could

    • Make CI artifacts available (not started)

Work Package E: SBOM improvements

This work package intends to improve existing, and implement new, tooling and processes for FreeBSD Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) by implementing: tooling to roll up the individual provenance data/markers from across the tree into a higher-level view; developing tooling to parse/review/inspect the FreeBSD source tree and produce a comprehensive/holistic report to act as a SBOM for the full software stack and; extending pkg to enable this capability for software installed from ports/packages.

The detailed scope was co-created with core@, portmgr@, pkgmgr@, secteam@, releng@

  • Must

    • Evaluate projects/solutions available in the wider ecosystem (in progress)

    • Propose the target solution for SBOM (not started)

    • Produce an SBOM in CI (e.g. weekly builds) (in progress)

    • Produce an SBOM as an artifact as part of the release process (in progress)

    • SBOM artifact on demand (in progress)

    • Roll up existing data (not started)

    • Record and explain decisions made (not started)

  • Could

    • Engage with other similar projects (not started)

Commissioning body: Sovereign Tech Agency

Support for pkgbase in the FreeBSD installer

Contact: Isaac Freund <ifreund@freebsdfoundation.org>

The FreeBSD installer now supports installing a pkgbase system.

Recent FreeBSD 15.0 snapshots have a new dialog in the installer that allows the user to fetch and install packages from pkg.freebsd.org instead of using the legacy distribution sets.

There is also support in the build system to build FreeBSD installation media with offline pkgbase packages included, enabling fully offline installation of a pkgbase system. These offline pkgbase packages are not yet included in 15.0 snapshot release installation however, as including both the offline legacy distribution sets and pkgbase packages would significantly increase the size of the installation media. There is however a -DPKGBASE build-time switch ready to be flipped by the FreeBSD Release Engineering team, hopefully in the near future.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

BSD-USER 4 LINUX

Contact: Maksym Sobolyev <sobomax@FreeBSD.org>

Links: Project Page URL: https://github.com/sobomax/qemu-bsd-user-l4b
Tooling URL: https://github.com/sobomax/qemu_l4b

The bsd-user-4-linux project ports BSD user-mode emulation for QEMU to Linux. The primary goal is to enable unmodified FreeBSD binaries to run on modern Linux systems. Additionally, the project aims to provide multi-platform container images with a functional FreeBSD environment and ready-to-use GitHub Actions templates.

News:

  • Two new pull requests have been received since the initial project announcement:

    • Diagnostic output cleanup;

    • kqueue() support using libkqueue library on Linux.

  • The latest set of changes has been pulled from the Warner’s qemu-bsd-user project bringing Qemu version to 9.2.0 along with some fixes and improvements.

Current Status:

Next Steps: * Bump FreeBSD version to 14.3; * Rebase onto Qemu 10.0.x.

How You Can Help:

  • Test with your preferred toolchain, report issues, or contribute fixes.

  • Identify and implement missing system calls.

  • Support us on Patreon.

Sponsor: Sippy Software, Inc.

Sylve — A Unified System Management Platform for FreeBSD

Links:
GitHub URL: https://github.com/AlchemillaHQ/Sylve
CI URL: https://sylve-ci.alchemilla.io
Discord URL: https://discord.gg/bJB826JvXK

Contact: Hayzam Sherif <hayzam@alchemilla.io>

Sylve is a modern, unified system management platform for FreeBSD, inspired by Proxmox. We aim to provide an integrated web interface for managing virtual machines (via Bhyve), Jails, ZFS storage, networking, and firewalling. The backend is implemented in Go, while the frontend uses SvelteKit with Tailwind CSS and ShadCN UI components.

The project emphasizes a minimal system footprint, currently requiring only sysutils/smartmontools, sysutils/tmux, and libvirt as runtime dependencies.

Sylve continues to address a key gap in the FreeBSD ecosystem by delivering a cohesive, user-friendly interface for system administration tasks.

Q2 Progress Highlights

Dashboard

Added dynamic charts to the main summary page, including real-time visualization of CPU usage, RAM usage, and network throughput.

Networking

Interfaces can now be viewed in detail through the UI, with all relevant metadata presented in a structured format.

Users can also create "switches" — simple layer 2 switches built on top of FreeBSD bridge interfaces.

Storage

ZFS integration is nearing completion. Users can now:

  • Create and destroy pools, filesystems, volumes, and snapshots.

  • Delete multiple datasets at once.

  • Schedule automatic (timed) snapshots.

Initial dashboard work for ZFS monitoring has started, with further enhancements planned in Q3.

Utilities

A built-in downloader was introduced that supports both HTTP and magnet links. This is especially useful for fetching ISO images or VM templates directly through the interface.

Virtual Machines

VM creation and deletion with Bhyve is now supported.

Key features include:

  • CPU pinning.

  • Web-based VNC console access.

  • PCI passthrough for devices.

  • Basic CPU and RAM usage charts for each VM.

A new runtime dependency on libvirtd has been added to support VM lifecycle operations.

Planned for Q3

  • Polish and stabilize current functionality.

  • Ability to edit VMs.

  • Expand charting and add a basic notification system to detect hardware or service failures.

  • Implement UI and API support for managing Jails.

  • Extend networking features:

    • More switch/bridge types.

    • Firewall rule configuration.

    • DHCP support via dns/dnsmasq or similar (for VMs).

    • WireGuard VPN integration.

Contributions, testing, and feedback are very welcome. If you are interested in contributing, consider helping with:

  • UI testing and accessibility feedback.

  • Bug reports and feature requests via GitHub.

Sponsor: FreeBSD Foundation and Alchemilla (development and infrastructure support)

Hackathon 202506 Kitchener-Waterloo, Canada

Links:
Hackathon/202506 Wiki Page URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Hackathon/202506 FreeBSD Hackathon Wiki Page URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Hackathon

In the week following BSDCan 2025, a hackathon took place in the Kitchener-Waterloo area.

Thanks to Ed Maste for hosting this event at the Communitech Hub in Kitchener.

Pictures of the hackathon

Pictures of the hackathon are collected here.

National FreeBSD day landed sometime during the hackathon, so Charlie Li treated us to a great DJ set to celebrate, mixing entirely on FreeBSD at an arcade bar in Waterloo :)

The work done during the hackathon

WiFi Testbed (Li-Wen Hsu)

  • The hardware of a proof-of-concept wireless has been set up in Foundation’s Kitchener office.

  • The current setup is simple:

  • One baremetal machine has multiple wireless interface and,

  • One access point is also connected to the machine via a serial console and a private testing network

  • Currently we have following hardware to be passthru to bhyve VM provisioned with the image from Artifact server of FreeBSD CI

  • Intel AX210

  • Realtek RTL8812AU

  • The work continues on connecting it to FreeBSD CI cluster as a downstream job after standard tests finishes.

Installer (Joseph Mingrone, Ed Maste, Aymeric Wibo)
pkgbase (Ed Maste)
Landing scheduler run queue patches (Olivier Certner)
Capsicum (Ed Maste)
s2idle/S0ix/USB4 (Aymeric Wibo, Sheng-Yi Hung)

  • Fix some more USB4 driver panics.

  • Discuss how s2idle should work w.r.t. the scheduler with Olivier & Mark, and temporarily implement "idle" state for the scheduler (where it just always chooses the idle thread).

  • Extend amdgpio driver to service all GPIO interrupts (requirement for S0i3 on AMD). We were also looking into how we can consume GPIO interrupts in device drivers on x86 for stuff like reducing the latency of the Framework trackpad with Sheng-Yi.

  • Implement some more S0i3 debugging features for AMD to help us debug why we would not be entering S0i3.

Ports (Joseph Mingrone)
Miscellaneous (Ed Maste, Olivier Certner, Sheng-Yi Hung, Li-Wen Hsu)

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

Userland

Changes affecting the base system and programs in it.

ucred / group changes in FreeBSD 15.0

Links:
freebsd-arch@ discussion URL: https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-hackers/2025-August/004825.html
Primary kernel change URL: https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/sys/sys/ucred.h?id=be1f7435ef218b1df35aebf3b90dd65ffd8bbe51
Primary userspace change URL: https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/sys/kern/kern_prot.c?id=9da2fe96ff2ea227e4d5f03ef92b55aabeabb7fc

Contact: Kyle Evans <kevans@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Olivier Certner <olce@FreeBSD.org>

FreeBSD 15.0 will change how supplementary groups are handled in both userspace and the kernel in FreeBSD 15.0 in a way that warrants additional attention and feedback.

For some background: FreeBSD has historically tracked the effective group-ID of a process in the ucred(9) cr_groups array as the first element, with the rest of the array describing its supplementary groups. The natural consequence of this decision is that the arrays used in setgroups(2) and getgroups(2) follow the same format, and setgroups(2) has the documented side effect of setting the effective group-ID. The vast majority of other platforms do not exhibit this behavior anymore, including NetBSD and OpenBSD. macOS appears to be the only exception found in testing.

The problem is that the vast majority of software in the FreeBSD Ports Collection comes from other platforms, where setgroups(2) and setgroups(2) operate purely on the supplementary groups. This kind of a behavior difference is very subtle and would need to be audited more carefully to be sure that we have not introduced a potential security issue in ported software.

In FreeBSD 15.0, the primary user-facing change is that setgroups(2), getgroups(2), and initgroups(3) behavior will change to match other platforms, and users are requested to be extra vigilant in areas that may be affected as we proceed through the release cycle. In general, the expectation is that this change may:

  • Fix some small number of bugs where we would have lost either our expected effective group membership or one of the supplementary groups we should have been in

  • (Less likely) Introduce some even smaller number of bugs where something expected setgroups(2) to change our effective group membership but now it is just a supplementary group and our effective group-ID is unchanged

Software included in the base system is largely unaffected or improved by this change, with OpenSSH being a notable example of a strange bug caused by the historical implementation.

MIT Kerberos Import into FreeBSD

Contact: Cy Schubert <cy@FreeBSD.org>

The FreeBSD Foundation was approached to import MIT KRB5 into FreeBSD with the intent to replace our aging Heimdal.

The Enterprise Working Group made a request to the Foundation to replace Heimdal with MIT KRB5.

This is the first report for this project.

Tasks completed:

  • MIT KRB5 has been imported into FreeBSD 15-CURRENT.

  • The WITH_MITKRB5 option is disabled until a successful ports exp-run is complete.

Additional remaining tasks:

  • Fix port build errors identified by a ports exp-run.

  • Produce a writeup of the new Kerberos.

  • Determine if migration of the Heimdal database to an MIT database is possible. (At the moment this appears unlikely due to the age of our ancient Heimdal and the lack of support for old crypto in newer Heimdal MIT).

  • Produce Heimdal Kerberos database to MIT database migration documentation (if possible).

  • (Optional) Develop and discuss the import and migration options at the next BSDCan.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

SysctlTui

Link:
Project Repository URL: https://gitlab.com/alfix/sysctltui

Contact: Alfonso Sabato Siciliano <asiciliano@FreeBSD.org>

SysctlTUI is an interactive text user interface (TUI) utility for exploring and managing sysctl(3) parameters. It presents the sysctl Management Information Base (MIB) as a hierarchical and navigable tree, enabling users to:

  • Browse metadata for each kernel parameter.

  • Retrieve and display current values.

  • Modify parameters interactively from within the interface.

The UI consists of three panels: a tree view of the MIB hierarchy, a detail panel showing metadata, and a value editor. Pressing the F1 key opens a help dialog explaining:

  • When the MIB is built.

  • When values are retrieved or updated.

  • A link to an online guide for getting started with sysctl, including guidance on interpreting and using the displayed data.

Although still in early development (currently at version 0.0.2), SysctlTUI already offers functionality comparable to tools like sysutils/nsysctl and deskutils/sysctlview. A manual page is included, with suggestions to make the output similar to sysctl(8) or nsysctl(8). The ToDo list outlining plans for enhancements like configuration file integration and subtree sorting by names.

SysctlTUI is open source and available via the FreeBSD Ports Collection: sysutils/sysctltui. Note: TUIs are a known accessibility issue, as they are not usable with most screen readers. Users who access FreeBSD using a screen reader can use the sysutils/nsysctl package instead. It is a command line utility that provides the same information as SysctlTUI, since both tools use the same underlying kernel interface.

Geomman Development

Links:
Geomman GSoC wiki URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/SummerOfCode2025Projects/FullDiskAdministrationToolForFreeBSD
geomman Gitlab repository URL: https://gitlab.com/brauliorivas/geomman
bsddialog repository URL: https://gitlab.com/alfix/bsddialog
sade URL: https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=sade&manpath=FreeBSD+14.3-RELEASE+and+Ports

Contact: Braulio Rivas <brauliorivas@FreeBSD.org>

Geomman is a new partition tool based on sade(8) that brings more functionality such as moving, copying, and pasting partitions. Geomman is part of Google Summer of Code 2025. Currently, it is available in a Gitlab repository. But at some future time, it is expected to become a tool in the base system.

Geomman is a TUI designed to allow to growing, shrinking, moving, copying, and pasting partitions with filesystems other than UFS. For example, users may be able to create an exFAT partition, as well as to resize an ext4 filesystem. This would make partition management easier, because there are tools for each individual task (mainly depending on the filesystem), but none that concentrates all cases in a single tool.

For the moment, geomman only allows copying and pasting partitions. However, for the next report the tool should be almost finished.

Currently, I am working on a mechanism to move partitions using dd(1). Other approaches may be possible, so any help is very welcome.

The next steps for geomman are:

  • Develop a way of moving partitions.

  • Handle duplicate UUIDs between partitions when using dd.

  • Add options to create, grow, and shrink more filesystem types.

Sponsor: Google Summer of Code

Kernel

Updates to kernel subsystems/features, driver support, filesystems, and more.

Audio Stack Improvements

Contact: Christos Margiolis <christos@FreeBSD.org>

I have been working on the audio stack since 2024Q1. Below is a list of the previous status reports:

2024Q1 URL: https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2024-01-2024-03/#_audio_stack_improvements
2024Q2 URL: https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2024-04-2024-06/#_audio_stack_improvements
2024Q3 URL: https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2024-07-2024-09/#_audio_stack_improvements
2024Q4 URL: https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2024-10-2024-12/#_audio_stack_improvements
2025Q1 URL: https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2025-01-2025-03/#_audio_stack_improvements

Important work since last report:

  • More sound(4) cleanups, fixes and improvements.

  • Committed sndctl(8) (previously mentioned as audio(8)).

  • Committed AFMT_FLOAT support.

  • More out-of-the-box laptop support.

  • Gave up on the /dev/dsp as a router device patch in favor of D50070 (includes relevant discussions).

  • Submitting series of patches to clean up the MIDI subsystem, and working on refactoring it into a generic layer, similar to PCM.

  • Gave BSDCan 2025 talk (slides).

Future work includes:

  • Port virtual_oss to base.

  • More bug fixes, support, optimizations and general improvements, in all areas of the sound stack.

You can also follow the development process in freebsd-multimedia@, where I post regular reports.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

DRM drivers

Links:
Update to Linux 6.9 DRM drivers URL: https://github.com/freebsd/drm-kmod/pull/361

Contact: Jean-Sébastien Pédron <dumbbell@FreeBSD.org>

DRM drivers are kernel drivers for integrated and discrete GPUs. They are maintained in the Linux kernel and we port them to FreeBSD. As of this report, we take the AMD and Intel DRM drivers only (NVIDIA FreeBSD drivers are proprietary and provided by NVIDIA themselves).

We port them one Linux version at a time. This allows us to ship updates more often and it eases porting and debugging because we have a smaller delta compared to a bigger jump skipping several versions.

This quarter, we finally merged the drivers from Linux 6.7 and 6.8 that were done during the first quarter into drm-kmod. The porting for DRM drivers from Linux 6.9 was finished and is now ready for review and testing; see the pull request for instructions if you want to try them. The pull request also lists all the patches needed to linuxkpi, the Linux drivers compatibility layer in the FreeBSD kernel. Several patches were already reviewed but there is still work.

These updates target the FreeBSD 15-CURRENT development branch for now. Once kernel patches are accepted and the DRM drivers updates merged, we will evaluate if/how we can backport the kernel patches to earlier release branches (namely 14-STABLE).

While waiting for review, we also started to work on two features which were unsupported on FreeBSD:

They are apparently required to allow the use of wlroots-based Wayland compositors with the Vulkan API (see https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=286311). wlroots will need a patch as well because it only expects these features on Linux for now.

Both pull requests as well as the patches to linuxkpi they rely on are ready for review and testing. The linuxkpi patches are linked in the pull requests.

This work is kindly sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation as part of the Laptop and Desktop Project.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

Suspend/Resume Improvement

Links:
Blog URL: https://obiw.ac/s0ix/
FOSDEM talk on s2idle/S0ix URL: https://youtu.be/mBxj_EkAzV0
Working Repo URL: https://github.com/obiwac/freebsd-s0ix/tree/everything
Tip of the s2idle/S0ix + AMD SMU stack URL: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D48721
USB4 suspend stack URL: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D49453

Contact: obiwac <obiwac@FreeBSD.org>

Suspend-to-idle and support for S0ix sleep is in the process of being added to FreeBSD.

This will allow modern Intel and AMD laptops (e.g. AMD and newer Intel Framework laptops), some of which do not support ACPI S3 sleep, to enter low power states to increase battery life.

The USB4 driver (which was a dependency to S0i3 entry) has been updated to allow for the sleep routines, and all CPUs are now entering C3 during s2idle. Scheduler work is needed to ensure CPUs stay in C3 and do not get work scheduled to them, but a prototype solution exists and is working. This means that S0i3 can now be entered on the Framework 13 AMD Ryzen 7040 series laptops, albeit only on my working 14.1 branch. This does not work on -CURRENT yet.

The amdgpio driver (for the AMD GPIO controller) has been extended to service all GPIO interrupts and suspend the controller, as that was potentially a blocker for the CPU to enter S0i3. Nothing is being done with these GPIO interrupts at the moment as FreeBSD does not have the infrastructure for device drivers to register these interrupts on x86 yet.

The SMU idlemask is also now being exported as a sysctl now (dev.amdsmu.0.idlemask), the value of which is not documented and is mostly to help AMD debug issues with S0i3 entry on FreeBSD on their side.

A pre-built image is being built to aid in easily testing S0i3 entry on machines.

With respect to the links, the blog post entry is outdated. A talk was given about this at BSDCan 2025 too, but it has yet to be uploaded as a standalone video; it will be included in the next status report.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

Named attribute support (Solaris style extended attributes)

Contact: Rick Macklem <rmacklem@FreeBSD.org>

Named attributes is the NFSv4 term for what is also known as Solaris style extended attributes. Since ZFS has its origins in Solaris, the wiring for these exists in OpenZFS. This little project consists of connecting that wiring up. This is not intended to replace the extended attribute support already in FreeBSD. It provides an alternate mechanism for manipulating extended attributes that will be supported for ZFS and NFSv4. There are a few reasons I think this could be useful (as indicated via email discussion). This mechanism allows for extended attributes as large as any regular file, which can be partially updated. Some NFSv4 clients, such as MacOS and Windows, can use these extended attributes but not the FreeBSD/Linux style ones. (I think MacOS calls these extended attributes fork files and Windows calls them alternate data streams.) There is software, such as bash, that know how to manipulate these extended attributes.

The fundamental difference is that this mechanism provides a directory that is not in the file system’s namespace, but is associated with a file object. This named attribute directory can then be read via readdir(3) to get the list of extended attributes, which are really just regular files. These extended attributes are then read/written like any regular file.

The top level system call interface is open(2)/openat(2) with the new O_NAMEDATTR flag (called O_XATTR on Solaris).

Most of the work has been committed to FreeBSD’s main for FreeBSD 15. Once the ZFS patch makes it through review and gets pulled into OpenZFS, the ZFS and NFSv4 support should work. There are also a couple of manual pages currently under review in phabricator.

The main thing left to do is update libarchive/tar so that large extended attributes can be archived/retrieved. (The current FreeBSD extended attribute mechanism is supported by libarchive, but will have size constraints.)

Packrat — NFS client caching on non-volatile storage

Contact: Rick Macklem <rmacklem@freebsd.org>

NFSv4.1/4.2 provides support for a feature called delegations. When a NFSv4.1/4.2 client holds a delegation, the client has certain rights to a file, including a guarantee that no other client will make changes to the file unless the delegation is recalled. As such, when a client holds a delegation for a file, it can aggressively cache the file’s data, knowing that it will not be modified by other clients until it returns the delegation.

This project is intended to allow the NFSv4.1/4.2 client to aggressively cache file data on client local non-volatile storage, when the client holds a delegation for the file. I created a patch long ago to try and do this for NFSv4.0, but it was never at a stage where it was worth using. This project is a complete rewrite of the patch, done in part because NFSv4.1/4.2 plus other recent NFSv4 related changes makes doing this more feasible.

The patch is getting stable now, but I am not sure if it will be ready for inclusion in FreeBSD 15 as an experimental feature enabled via a new mount option called "packrat".

The main thing I still need to do is code a writeback kernel thread. Right now, dirty chunks stored on client local non-volatile storage get written back to the NFSv4.1/4.2 server upon umount. This can result in the umount taking a long time (as in many minutes). To alleviate this, I am planning on implementing a writeback kernel process that will walk the non-volatile storage and write the dirty chunks back. The trick is to make it aggressive enough that most dirty chunks have been written back when a umount is done, but not so aggressive that it impedes the performance of synchronous NFSv4.1/4.2 RPCs.

This will be very much an experimental feature, but it is hoped it will allow NFS mounts to be used more effectively, particularly in WAN situations, such as a mobile laptop.

There is still work to be done, particularly with respect to recovery of delegations after a NFSv4.1/4.2 client restart.

LinuxKPI 802.11 and Native Wireless Update

Links:
802.11ac support URL:https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop/issues/33
LinuxKPI TKIP and GCMP support URL:https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop/issues/64
LinuxKPI wireless suspend and resume URL:https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop/issues/58
MediaTek mt76 PCI driver support URL:https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop/issues/66
802.11ax support URL:https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop/issues/34
net80211 updates URL:https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop/issues/79
Tracked wireless PRs URL:https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/showdependencytree.cgi?id=277512&hide_resolved=1

Contact: Bjoern A. Zeeb <bz@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: The FreeBSD wireless mailing list <wireless@FreeBSD.org>

This report focuses on the efforts using permissively licensed Linux wireless drivers, mostly unmodified, on FreeBSD, as well as preparing the native net80211 stack for support of newer standards.

As announced iwlwififw(4) was removed from the source tree in favor of a ports/package based solution. Users are asked to use fwget(8) to automatically install the firmware along with any possible configuration.

Support for wlan_tkip(4) was added to linuxkpi(4) but has to be manually enabled. wlan_gcmp(4) support for linuxkpi(4) followed later and is available from FreeBSD 15 onward.

FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE is the first release with VHT (802.11ac) support available. Modern iwlwifi(4) chipsets are supported. There was some fallout after the release and a few open problems, but also a lot of positive feedback.

rtw88(4) saw a fix for a NULL pointer in the driver and is now starting to be usable. Thanks to everyone who helped track this down and test patches along the way.

Work on suspend and resume for LinuxKPI-based wireless drivers was picked up again, and we are getting closer to a working solution (at least for suspend it now exists).

Work is also ongoing for Mediatek mt76-based PCIe card support.

HE (802.11ax) definitions were migrated from linuxkpi(4) to native net80211 code and corrected. ifconfig(8) was enhanced parsing more information elements to aid debugging. Work is in progress to fix a problem with reporting signal strength and dealing with RSSI.

Further fixes to LinuxKPI and resolving the problems we worked around by improving native net80211 code are in the works.

Lastly, various man pages were improved or written.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

USB Kernel Debugging

Contact: Tom Jones <thj@FreeBSD.org>

XHCI USB controllers offer a mode which allows them to be used as a system debugging interface. XHCI debug uses a special USB 3 cable with VBUS, D+ and D- disconnected. The feature can be used to live debug the FreeBSD kernel, enabling investigation of issues which cause the system video console to lock up and there is not an alternative such as a serial console. This can happen when debugging issues with graphics drivers.

Hiroki Sato developed support for the XHCI debug interface and made it available as some in progress git branches. This implementation enables FreeBSD to operate as both a Debug Host and a Debug Target, with support for debugging from the loader through to the kernel.

I have been updating and testing this support along with Mitchell Horne and together we have a WIP branch which applies to FreeBSD main. We are currently tidying up interfaces and testing for stability with the goal of introducing XHCI debug once 16 is branched.

In doing the XHCI debug work I rediscovered a second form of kernel debugging implemented by Hans Petter Selasky (hselasky@) in 2009. The FreeBSD USB stack supports using a USB serial device as a system console and includes support to continue polling the interface once the system has entered the debugger (such as during a panic). USB Serial debugging allows a developer with two commodity USB serial interfaces to connect to a FreeBSD target and debug the kernel. USB Serial debugging is available in all FreeBSD releases in FreeBSD 9, but changes in the kernel build process mean that it is not detected in modern kernels.

In this quarter I have been working on documentation required to use this interface and changes to make it available in GENERIC kernels for newer FreeBSD releases.

A core part of this work has been trying to document kernel debugging interfaces. If you use live debug interfaces other than serial or network debugging please get in touch so I can add these to the FreeBSD Developers Handbook.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

Porting HFS+ to FreeBSD

Links:
Project Home URL: https://github.com/stupendoussuperpowers/freebsd_hfs

Contact: Sanchit Sahay <ss19723@nyu.edu>

HFS+ (Hierarchical File System) is a legacy filesystem introduced by Apple for its BSD-based XNU operating systems. Although HFS+ has been deprecated in favor of APFS, it is still in use on many older Apple devices, such as iPods, which rely on HFS+ volumes for storage.

While many modern operating systems include native support for HFS+, FreeBSD currently offers only limited functionality via FUSE. This project aims to address that limitation by porting the original, now open-sourced HFS+ implementation to the FreeBSD kernel as a native filesystem driver.

The primary focus of this effort is to modernize the VFS layer to align with current FreeBSD interfaces and to adapt XNU-specific logic to their FreeBSD equivalents.

Features implemented:

  • Mount support for HFS, HFS+ Volumes

  • Read, stat support for directories and files

  • Create support for directories and files

  • mount_hfs binary

Architectures

Updating platform-specific features and bringing in support for new hardware platforms.

Pinephone Pro Support

Links:
Repository on Codeberg URL: https://codeberg.org/Honeyguide/freebsd-pinephonepro

Contact: Toby Kurien <toby@tobykurien.com>

The project to port FreeBSD over to the Pinephone Pro is progressing. The aim of this project is to step by step support components of the Pinephone Pro in FreeBSD so that the device one day might be usable as a highly mobile FreeBSD device.

In this quarter, a new development release has been made available for flashing and testing on a PinePhone Pro. It includes a newly added touch driver, and a minimal desktop environment with an on-screen keyboard. You can simply flash this build to an SD card and boot it up, provided you have the correct version of U-boot bootloader installed (details at the repository). The image also contains the kernel and drivers source code, along with editors/vim editor and build tools, allowing for development of drivers on-device.

To facilitate testing and driver development, network access has been enabled via the headphone jack (using the headphone-to-USB-serial adapter). It works by using Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) to access the network via your PC. Details of setting this up are in the repository README file.

Work is now under way to develop USB and WiFi drivers. As always, contributions in the form of testing, feedback, upstreaming, driver development, or just words of encouragement are welcome.

See the post on the FreeBSD Forum for more: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/porting-freebsd-to-pinephone-pro-help-needed.95948/

Sponsor: Honeyguide Group

Cloud

Updating cloud-specific features and bringing in support for new cloud platforms.

FreeBSD on EC2

Contact: Colin Percival <cperciva@FreeBSD.org>

FreeBSD is available on both amd64 (Intel and AMD) and arm64 (Graviton) EC2 instances.

In the past quarter, the final bits needed for "hot plug" (and unplug) landed, allowing this to be fully functional in FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE. FreeBSD "AMI Builder AMIs" are now being produced as part of the FreeBSD release building process (including for 14.3-RELEASE).

Sponsor: Amazon
Sponsor: https://www.patreon.com/cperciva

Documentation

Noteworthy changes in the documentation tree, manual pages, or new external books/documents.

Documentation Engineering Team

FreeBSD Documentation Project URL: https://www.freebsd.org/docproj/
FreeBSD Documentation Project Primer for New Contributors URL: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/fdp-primer/
Documentation Engineering Team URL: https://www.freebsd.org/administration/#t-doceng

Contact: FreeBSD Doceng Team <doceng@FreeBSD.org>

The doceng@ team is a body to handle some of the meta-project issues associated with the FreeBSD Documentation Project; for more information, see FreeBSD Doceng Team Charter.

During the last quarter the following commit bits were taken for safekeeping:

  • ale

  • brueffer

  • danger

  • glewis

  • hrs

  • ygy

Team changes:

  • doceng@ welcomes ebrandi@ as a new member (lurker).

  • carlavilla@ stepped down from doceng@. doceng@ thanks him for his service.

  • dbaio@ stepped down from doceng@. doceng@ thanks him for his service.

  • fernape@ stepped down from doceng@. doceng@ thanks him for his service.

Document changes

  • Handbook

    • The jails chapter has been updated

    • The Wi-Fi information have been updated

  • Website

    • Plausible Analytics have been added to the website

  • Porter’s Handbook:

    • Document Uses=gnome:gnomedesktop4

Many typos have been fixed in all related documents.

  • Documentation repository:

    • Added manpages for macOS 10.12.0, 10.15.0, and 11.1

    • Updated manpages for macOS to 15.5.0

    • Added OpenIndiana manpages for 2013.08, 2015.10, 2020.10, 2022.10, and 2024.10

    • Added manpages for NetBSD 9.4

    • Added manpages for OpenBSD 7.7

    • Updated Debian manpages to 12.11.0

FreeBSD Translations on Weblate

Translate FreeBSD on Weblate URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Doc/Translation/Weblate
FreeBSD Weblate Instance URL: https://translate-dev.freebsd.org/

Q2 2025 Status

  • 20 team languages

  • 252 registered users

6 new translators joined Weblate:

  • @mohamad (fa)

  • @v.popolitov (ru)

  • @SochiByte

  • @carlosdaniel26

  • @tj (nl_NL)

  • @Natthachai043 (en)

Languages

  • Chinese (Simplified) (zh_CN) (progress: 7%)

  • Chinese (Traditional) (zh_TW) (progress: 3%)

  • Dutch (nl_NL) (progress: 1%)

  • French (fr_FR) (progress: 1%)

  • German (de_DE) (progress: 1%)

  • Greek (progress: 1%)

  • Indonesian (progress: 1%)

  • Italian (it_IT) (progress: 4%)

  • Korean (progress: 30%)

  • Norwegian Bokmål (progress: 1%)

  • Persian (progress: 3%)

  • Polish (progress: 1%)

  • Portuguese (progress: 0%)

  • Portuguese (Brazil) (progress: 23%)

  • Russian (progress: 37%)

  • Spanish (progress: 35%)

  • Turkish (tr_TR) (progress: 1%)

We want to thank everyone that contributed, translating or reviewing documents.

And please, help promote this effort on your local user group, we always need more volunteers.

Packages maintained by DocEng

During this quarter the following work was done in packages maintained by doceng@:

Open issues

There is 1 Open PRs in Bugzilla assigned to doceng@:

  • 267274 Please remove the zh-CN Handbook of the current FreeBSD website

FreeBSD Wiki

Links:
FreeBSD wiki front page URL: https://wiki.freebsd.org/FrontPage

Contact: Mark Linimon <linimon@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Wiki admin <wiki-admin@FreeBSD.org>

Since the last status report, several people have expressed an interest in bringing the wiki up to the level it ought to be.

The ongoing discussions (mostly taking place on the FreeBSD Discord) are concerned with the topics of:

  • Defining what content we consider useful.

  • Ensuring that the useful content is kept current.

  • Figuring out a way to keep obsolete content away from search engines.

  • Add basic analytics to existing site to see what pages, if any,are actually being accessed.

  • Decide on whether MoinMoin can still be useful for purpose in the short-term while we consider the longer-term needs listed above.

We do not yet have consensus on these issues.

Please join us on the FreeBSD Discord #documentation under the #wiki subthread.

Vision Accessibility

Link:
Project Repository URL: https://gitlab.com/alfix/freebsd-accessibility

Contact: FreeBSD Accessibility mailing list <freebsd-accessibility@FreeBSD.org>
Contact: Alfonso Sabato Siciliano <asiciliano@FreeBSD.org>

This quarter, the review for the FreeBSD Accessibility Handbook was submitted and is available at: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D50894. The review includes a link to an HTML preview.

The handbook aims to document assistive technologies for vision accessibility available in FreeBSD, covering both the BASE system and the Ports Collection. It is divided into two parts and contains six chapters:

  1. Help — Covers how to request assistance effectively through appropriate FreeBSD communication channels.

  2. Virtual Terminal — Documents vision-related accessibility features of the FreeBSD console (vt(4)).

  3. Colors — Explains how to configure color schemes, including high-contrast themes and adjusting screen colors for ambient lighting.

  4. Low Vision — Outlines accessibility tools in graphical desktop environments for users with low vision, such as screen magnifiers, readable fonts, and scaling.

  5. Blindness — Describes assistive technologies for blind users, focusing primarily on screen readers and compatible tools.

  6. Development — Provides resources for developers to make their software accessible, test accessibility, and improve support for users with visual impairments.

The handbook deliberately avoids images and minimizes non-plain-text elements to enhance compatibility with assistive technologies. Tips and new ideas are welcome. If possible, send reports to the FreeBSD Accessibility mailing list, to share and to track discussions in a public place.

Sponsored by: The FreeBSD Foundation

Ports

Changes affecting the Ports Collection, whether sweeping changes that touch most of the tree, or individual ports themselves.

Security Hardening Compiler Options for the Ports Collection

Links:
Commit of the features URL: https://cgit.freebsd.org/ports/commit/Mk/Features/fortify.mk?id=7a489e95c51f47f5e25a5613e375ec000618e52a
FreeBSD security hardening with compiler options URL: https://www.leidinger.net/blog/2025/05/24/freebsd-security-hardening-with-compiler-options/

Contact: Alexander Leidinger <netchild@FreeBSD.org>

The Ports Collection gained the possibility to enable some security features of modern compilers for package builds. As not all ports are compatible with them, this is not enabled by default.

The 3 new features which can be enabled for the Ports Collection in make.conf are:

  • WITH_FORTIFY=yes: This enables mitigations of common memory safety issues, such as buffer overflows, by adding checks to functions like memcpy, strcpy, sprintf, and others when the compiler can determine the size of the destination buffer at compile time. This requires support from the FreeBSD base system and may only be available in FreeBSD 15 onwards.

  • WITH_STACK_AUTOINIT=yes: This enables a compiler specific option to automatically initialize local (automatic) variables to prevent the use of uninitialized memory.

  • WITH_ZEROREGS=yes: Zero call-used registers at function return to increase program security by either mitigating Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) attacks or preventing information leakage through registers. This depends upon support from the compiler for a given architecture. This is disabled for python ports; currently there are issues.

The blog post referenced in the links section explains how to use them, how to exclude certain ports if needed, and provides a more detailed explanation of those 3 new features along the already existing build-time security options of the Ports Collection and the basesystem build.

Improve OpenJDK on FreeBSD

Links:
Project description URL: https://freebsdfoundation.org/project/improving-openjdk-on-freebsd/
Project repository URL: https://github.com/freebsd/openjdk

Contact:
Harald Eilertsen <haraldei@freebsdfoundation.org>
FreeBSD Java mailing list <freebsd-java@lists.freebsd.org>

The goal of this project is to improve OpenJDK support for FreeBSD/amd64 and FreeBSD/arm64.

Java is an important runtime environment for many high performance, critical enterprise systems. Making sure Java based applications run correctly and efficiently on FreeBSD is important to ensure that FreeBSD will continue to be a viable and attractive platform for enterprises, as well as businesses and organizations of all sizes.

In this quarter the following issues/milestones were reached:

In addition, a lot of time was spent cleaning up and refactoring the BSD port for Aarch64, fixing various issues and working towards making the BSD port up to date with the OpenJDK mainline.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation

GCC on FreeBSD

Links:
GCC Project URL: https://gcc.gnu.org/
GCC 12 release series URL: https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-12/
GCC 13 release series URL: https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-13/
GCC 14 release series URL: https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-14/
GCC 15 release series URL: https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-15/
GCC 16 release series URL: https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-16/

Contact: Lorenzo Salvadore <salvadore@FreeBSD.org>

The exp-run to update GCC default version from 13 to 14 is still suspended. As a reminder, it has been noticed that FreeBSD 13.4 lacks symbols that are used by GCC 14 for linking; please see https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=284499#c0 for a more detailed explanation. The symbols are however already present in higher FreeBSD versions. At the time this report is written, FreeBSD 13.4 is expected to go out of support soon (on June 30th), so it has been decided that it is preferable to suspend the exp-run until then. Thus it will get back on track on July 1st.

Meanwhile, GCC 15 has been released. As usual, the new port package lang/gcc15 has been created, as well as lang/gcc16-devel that tracks the latest GCC development.

More bugs have been addressed. Bug 285711 about issues with some CPUTYPE values has been fixed with a temporary workaround. The workaround will be needed until commit 22e564c74eb2 is included in all supported FreeBSD releases.

A build failure has been found on aarch64 machines, see bug 282797. A fix has been found and is about to be submitted upstream.

Third Party Projects

Many projects build upon FreeBSD or incorporate components of FreeBSD into their project. As these projects may be of interest to the broader FreeBSD community, we sometimes include brief updates submitted by these projects in our quarterly report. The FreeBSD project makes no representation as to the accuracy or veracity of any claims in these submissions.

Chinese FreeBSD Community (CFC)

Chinese FreeBSD Community (CFC) URL: https://bsdcn.org/

The community currently comprises 316 members in the QQ group and 175 members in the WeChat group.

Documentation Project

Links:
FreeBSD-Ask Documentation Project on GitHub URL: https://github.com/FreeBSD-Ask/
FreeBSD-Ask Documentation Project URL: https://book.bsdcn.org/

It is noteworthy that all prior FreeBSD documentation has been fully translated into Chinese, including but not limited to the following materials:

  • FreeBSD Release Notes (i386 or amd64)

  • FreeBSD Status Reports

  • FreeBSD Handbook

  • FreeBSD Porters Handbook

  • FreeBSD Articles

  • FreeBSD Architecture Handbook

  • Developers' Handbook

In addition, two classic works have been translated.

  • A Quarter Century of Unix

  • The UNIX-HATERS Handbook, an humoristic book written in 1994 about issues that some users found in the UNIX operating system. It includes an anti-foreword from Dennis Ritchie, one of the authors of UNIX, which he wrote in a style similar to the one used in the handbook itself.

FreeBSD-Ask

Links:
FreeBSD-Ask on GitHub URL: https://github.com/FreeBSD-Ask/FreeBSD-Ask
FreeBSD-Ask on Website URL: https://book.bsdcn.org/

Contact: ykla <yklaxds@gmail.com>
Contact: Voosk <roisfrank@icloud.com>

The FreeBSD-Ask was initiated on 14 March 2021 by ykla from the Chinese FreeBSD Community (CFC). It is an open-source publication written in Simplified Chinese that aims to provide introductory knowledge about the FreeBSD operating system.

Quarterly Updates

  • Documentation Additions:

    • Overview of FreeBSD Desktop Distributions

    • Installing databases/postgresql17-server with pgAdmin4

    • Migration Guide for Windows Users

    • FreeBSD as a Host with VirtualBox

  • Rewritten Documentation:

  • Miscellaneous:

    • The tutorials pertaining to DragonFly BSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD have undergone comprehensive translation, updating and rewriting.

    • Several GitHub Actions have been added to verify that images are referenced correctly.

    • We now support exporting FreeBSD-Ask to the ePub format.

    • A tutorial about the security/py-fail2ban port (utilizing ipfw(4), pf(4), and ipf(4)) has been submitted to the FreeBSD Journal for review.

It is hoped that an increasing number of contributors will join the documentation efforts. The primary objective of this project is to undertake a comprehensive modernisation and rewrite of the FreeBSD Handbook with a view to promoting the development and adoption of FreeBSD.

Ports

QQ Port on GitHub URL: https://github.com/FreeBSD-Ask/QQ-Port/
Bug 287292 - [NEW PORT] net-im/qq: consider restoring QQ port due to resumed upstream development URL: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=287292

In the current quarter, a port was created for QQ, one of the most popular instant messaging applications currently in use in mainland China. The bug report remains open and has not yet been assigned any reviewers.

Sponsors: Chinese FreeBSD Community (CFC)

Last modified on: August 29, 2025 by Chris Moerz