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 code with approval of Novell. 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 prank.[1]
FreeBSD 3
FreeBSD 3.0-RELEASE was announced on 16 October 1998.[2] The final release, 3.5-RELEASE, was announced on 24 June 2000.[3] FreeBSD 3.0 was the first branch able to support symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) systems, using a Giant lock and marked the transition from a.out to ELF executables. USB support was first introduced with FreeBSD 3.1, and the first Gigabit network cards were supported in 3.2-RELEASE.
FreeBSD 4
4.0-RELEASE appeared in March 2000[4] and the last 4-STABLE branch release was 4.11 in January 2005 supported until 31 January 2007.[5] FreeBSD 4 was lauded for its stability, was a favorite operating system for ISPs and web hosting providers during the first dot-com bubble,[dubious – discuss] and is widely regarded[by whom?] 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.[6]
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 and IA-64 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. 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 (gmirror), encryption (GBDE and GELI). This work was supported through sponsorship by DARPA.
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 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 sourceDarwin) 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, UFSjournaling, an experimental port of Sun's ZFS file system, GCC4, improved support for the ARMarchitecture, jemalloc (a memory allocator optimized for parallel computation,[8] which was ported to Firefox 3),[9] and major updates and optimizations relating to network, audio, and SMP performance.[10] Benchmarks showed significant performance improvements compared to previous FreeBSD releases as well as Linux.[11] 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.[clarification needed]
DTrace support was integrated in version 7.1,[12] and NetBSD[13] and FreeBSD 7.2 brought support for multi-IPv4/IPv6 jails.[14]
Code supporting the DEC Alpha architecture (supported since FreeBSD 4.0) was removed in FreeBSD 7.0.[15]
FreeBSD 8
FreeBSD 8.0 was officially released on 25 November 2009.[16] 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 ZFS support, a new USB stack with USB 3.0 and xHCI support added in FreeBSD 8.2, multicast 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 DTrace 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.[17]
FreeBSD 9
FreeBSD 9.0 was released on 12 January 2012. Key features of the release include a new installer (bsdinstall[18]), UFS journaling, ZFS version 28, userland DTrace, NFSv4-compatible NFS server and client, USB 3.0 support, support for running on the PlayStation 3, Capsicum sandboxing, and LLVM 3.0 in the base system.[19] The kernel and base system could be built with Clang, but FreeBSD 9.0 still used GCC4.2 by default. The PlayStation 4 video game console uses a derived version of FreeBSD 9.0, which Sony Computer Entertainment dubbed "Orbis OS".[20][21] FreeBSD 9.1 was released on 31 December 2012.[22] FreeBSD 9.2 was released on 30 September 2013.[23] FreeBSD 9.3 was released on 16 July 2014.[24]
FreeBSD 10
On 20 January 2014, the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team announced the availability of FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE.[25] Key features include the deprecation of GCC in favor of Clang, a new iSCSI implementation, VirtIO drivers for out-of-the-box KVM support, and a FUSE implementation.[26]
FreeBSD 10.1
Long Term Support Release
FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE was announced 14 November 2014,[27][28] and was supported for an extended term until 31 December 2016.[29] 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.[30]
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.[31]
replace code base with BSD-Lite 4.4 (to satisfy terms of the USL v. BSDi lawsuit settlement), new installer, new boot manager, support for more filesystems (MS-DOS, unionfs, kernfs), 64-bit offsets for large filesystems, loadable filesystems, imported loadable kernel modules from NetBSD[41]
Old version, not maintained: 2.0.5
10 June 1995
?
revamped VM system, full NIS client and server support, transaction TCP support, ISDN support, support for FDDI and Fast Ethernet (100Mbit) adapters, multi-lingual documentation, FreeBSD Ports bundled with installation media[42]
Old version, not maintained: 2.1
19 November 1995
?
Old version, not maintained: 2.1.5
July 1996
?
bug and security fixes, PCI bus probing, addition of some drivers[43]
Old version, not maintained: 2.1.6
December 1996
?
bug and security fixes, improvements to installation[44]
addition of Internet Software Consortium DHCP client to base, expanded USB device support, improved filesystem support (direct access to NTFS, Joliet extensions for ISO 9660)[56]
addition of jails, IPv6 support and IPsec with KAME (applications were also updated to support IPv6), OpenSSH integrated into the base system, new ATA/ATAPI driver (for all ATA compliant disks and ATAPI CDROM, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-ROM, DVD-RAM, LS120, ZIP and tape drives), emulator for SVR4 binary files, burncd, USB Ethernet adapter support, accept() filters, telnet encryption[60]
Old version, not maintained: 4.1
27 July 2000
?
Kqueue, improved IPsec, expanded DEC Alpha support, support for USB devices in default installation[61]
Old version, not maintained: 4.1.1
27 September 2000
?
virtual Ethernet device driver for bridged configurations, ATA100 controller support[62]
Old version, not maintained: 4.2
21 November 2000
?
basic USB scanner support, USB modem support, bug fixes for buffer overflows, FreeBSD Ports restructured[63]
Old version, not maintained: 4.3
20 April 2001
?
sound driver updates, TCP bug fixes, kqueue extended to the device layer[64]
TCP improvements (throughput, performance, and Denial-of-service mitigation), Soft updates enabled by default, improved Linux emulation, boot loader updated to boot from filesystems with 16K disk blocks (from 8K)[66]
Old version, not maintained: 4.6
15 June 2002
May 2003
update XFree86 to version 4.2.0, driver additions and updates[67]
AMD64 a Tier1 supported architecture, updated swap pager, Protocol Independent Multicast, updates to IPv6, IPSec and Bluetooth, major changes to ata driver (removed from Giant lock), NFSv4 client support, start of Turkish document translation,[76] remove floating point emulation support for i386,[77] new or improved IDE, SATA, and 802.11a/b/g device drivers, experimental support for multithreaded filtering and forwarding of IP traffic[78]
Old version, not maintained: 5.2.1
25 February 2004
31 December 2004
bugfix release, improved ATA/IDE and SATA handling[79]
Old version, not maintained: 5.3
6 November 2004
31 October 2006
ALTQ, multi-threaded and reentrant network and socket subsystems, addition of new debugging framework KDB, dynamic and static linker support for Thread Local Storage, import pf from OpenBSD, binary compatibility interface for native execution of NDIS drivers, replace XFree86 with X.org 6.7, sound card driver reorganization, cryptography enabled by default in base[80]
both cores of dual core processors made available for use by default in SMP-enabled kernels[82]
Old version, not maintained: 6.0
4 November 2005
31 January 2007
experimental support for PowerPC, WPA wireless security, more wireless networking adapter drivers, complete support for 802.11g, 802.11i, 802.1X and WME/WMM, filesystem and direct disk access performance improvements[83]
Old version, not maintained: 6.1
8 May 2006
31 May 2008
keyboard multiplexer, filesystem stability fixes, automatic configuration for many Bluetooth devices, drivers for Ethernet, SAS and SATA RAID controllers[84]
X.org updated to version 7.3, reimplementation of UnionFS, addition of upgrade command to freebsd-update[86]
Old version, not maintained: 6.4
28 November 2008
30 November 2010
support for Camellia cipher, boot loader changes (enabling booting from USB devices, and GPT-labeled devices with GPT-enabled BIOSes), malloc buffer corruption protection, DVD install ISO images for AMD64 and i386[87]
support for UltraSPARC III processors, transparent use of superpages in virtual memory subsystem, improvements to jail[91]
Old version, not maintained: 7.3
23 March 2010
31 March 2012
new boot loader gptzfsboot (support for GPT and ZFS), ZFS updated to version 13, Perl updated to version 5.10, support for VIA Nano processors[92][93]
Old version, not maintained: 7.4
24 February 2011
28 February 2013
add support for UltraSPARC IV, IV+, and SPARC64 V processors, IEEE 802.3 full duplex flow control (in miibus).[94] This is the final release in the 7-STABLE branch.
High Availability Storage, IPFW and dummynet improvements, SMP in PowerPC G5 systems, MP-safe MS-DOS filesystem, zfsloader, NFSv4 ACL for UFS and ZFS[96]
Various kernel changes and security fixes were implemented.[99][100]
Old version, not maintained: 9.0
12 January 2012
31 March 2013
Userland DTrace, substitute GCC with Clang and LLVM for base system, USB 3.0 support, UFS SoftUpdates+Journal, moving ATA disk drivers to the CAM system, update ZFS to version 28, replaced sysinstall with bsdinstall.[101]
Old version, not maintained: 9.1
30 December 2012
31 December 2014
Update of sound drivers; improved performance of IPv6 stack; new C++ stack; jail support for devfs, nullfs, and ZFS; sched_ule SMT load balancing improvements[102]
Old version, not maintained: 9.2
30 September 2013
31 December 2014
ZFS support for LZ4 compression and TRIM; removal of FireWire drivers from GENERIC kernel[103]
Virtualization improvements (bhyve, virtio); USB upgrades; use clang and LLVM by default; capsicum; pkgng; remove BIND; add LDNS and Unbound to base system; update ipfilter to 5.1.2; add support for Raspberry Pi, IEEE 802.11s, and FUSE; ZFS on root filesystem; replaced GNU tools with BSD-licensed versions[105]
Old version, not maintained: 10.1
14 November 2014
31 December 2016
UEFI;[106]UDP-Lite support for IPv4 and IPv6; new filesystem automounting utility; bhyve booting from ZFS; new console driver[107]
Old version, not maintained: 10.2
13 August 2015
31 December 2016
Update linux compatibility layer to support Centos 6 ports; ZFS performance and reliability improvements; update DRM for multiple X servers support[108]
Old version, not maintained: 10.3
28 March 2016
30 April 2018
improvements to UEFI boot loader and Linux compatibility; ZFS boot support and root on ZFS for UEFI; CAM Target Layer support for high availability services[109]
Old version, not maintained: 10.4
3 October 2017
31 October 2018
Full support for eMMC storage; support for Mellanox ConnectX-4 adapters; driver and software updates[110]
Expanding jail functionality to allow Linux to run in a jailed environment; upgrades to wireless networking stack (improvements to 802.11n and 802.11ac support)[118]
In-kernel framing and encryption of Transport Layer Security (TLS) versions 1.0 to 1.3; 64-bit ARM architecture promoted to Tier 1 support; upgrade of clang, LLVM, and related utilities to version 11.0.1; all supported architectures now use clang and LLVM toolchain by default; removal of deprecated utilities and libraries (binutils, gcc, GNU grep, CU-SeeMe); addition of driver for Intel QuickAssist (QAT) device; some drivers upgraded to support PowerPC64 architecture[121]
FIDO/U2F hardware authenticators enabled in ssh; ice(4) driver for Intel E800 Ethernet controllers update to 1.34.2-k, with firmware logging and initial DCB support; iwlwifi(4) driver for Intel IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax along with a LinuxKPI 802.11 compatibility layer; EC2 images built by default to boot using UEFI
bhyve hypervisor support more than 16 vCPUs in a guest; ASLR enabled for 64-bit executables by default; UFS filesystems snapshots when running with journaled soft updates; Add kernel wg(4) WireGuard driver; Add kernel netlink(4) network configuration protocol
update of LLVM & clang (to 17.0.6), OpenSSH (to 9.6p1), sendmail (to 8.18.1), OpenZFS (to 2.1.14); stability fixes to WiFi drivers; NFS server can now run in a vnet jail[125]
update OpenSSH (to 9.5p1), OpenSSL (to 3.0.12), OpenZFS (to 2.2); bhyve support for TPM & GPU passthrough; raise limit of cpu core count to 1024 on amd64 arm64 platforms; possibility to perform background filesystem checks on UFS file systems running with journaled soft updates[131]
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,[134] this allows users 5+ years of support, with trivial-to-easy upgrading within the release generation.