FreeBSD – Wikipedia

Version Release date Supported until Significant changes Old version, no longer maintained : 1.x November 1993

• The first official release.
• The Ports Collection.
• Fixed some outstanding bugs from import of 386BSD
• Addition of some ported applications (XFree86, XView, InterViews, elm, nntp)

Old version, no longer maintained : 2.x 22 November 1994

• Replaced code base with BSD-Lite 4.4 (to satisfy terms of the USL v. BSDi lawsuit settlement)
• New installer and new boot manager
• Loadable filesystems support for more filesystems (MS-DOS, unionfs, kernfs)
• Imported loadable kernel modules from NetBSD
• Replaced BSD malloc with phkmalloc
• Full Linux emulation with ELF
• Dummynet traffic shaping

Old version, no longer maintained : 3.x 16 October 1998

• symmetric multiprocessing (SMP)
• CAM (Common Access Method) SCSI system
• VESA video modes
• Initial USB device support
• Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM)
• Netgraph
• RAID-5 support in vinum

Old version, no longer maintained:

4.x 14 March 2000[69] 31 January 2007[130]

• IPv6 support and IPsec with KAME (applications were also updated to support IPv6)
• OpenSSH integrated into the base system
• Emulator for SVR4 binary files
• New jail(2) system call and jail(8) admin command added[131]
• Kqueue event notification interface
• Basic Firewire
• Basic HyperThreading support
• In-kernel cryptographic framework imported from OpenBSD
• USB2 support
• Added ports/CHANGES and ports/UPDATING to FreeBSD Ports

Old version, no longer maintained : 6.x 1 November 2005 30 November 2010

• Performance monitoring counters support
• New Wi-Fi stack
• GELI
• Network bridging
• NanoBSD utility
• NDIS driver support
• Keyboard multiplexer
• UFS filesystem stability
• Bluetooth autoconfiguration
• Additional Ethernet and RAID drivers
• Support for Xbox architecture
• OpenBSM audit subsystem
• freebsd-update (binary updates for security fixes and errata patches)

Old version, no longer maintained:

8.x 26 November 2009 1 August 2015

• SATA NCQ support
• Xen guest support
• High Availability Storage
• Native NFSv4 ACL support
• USB 3.0 support

Old version, no longer maintained : 9.x 12 January 2012 31 December 2016

• Capsicum capability-based security mechanism
• UFS SoftUpdates+Journal
• ZFS updated to version 28
• bsdconfig, system configuration utility
• bsdinstall, the new system installation program
• RCTL, a flexible resource limits mechanism
• GRAID, flexible software RAID implementation
• virtio drivers
• pkgng[132]
• vt, the new virtual terminal implementation

Old version, no longer maintained:

10.x 20 January 2014 31 October 2018[133]

• bhyve hypervisor
• Clang replaced GCC on supported architectures
• New iSCSI stack
• Added support for Raspberry Pi
• UEFI boot for amd64
• ZFS booting via UEFI
• ZFS on root file system
• ZFS reliability and performance improvements
• Implementation of pkg, a new FreeBSD package manager, also referred to as pkgng[134]
• Support for UDP Lite protocol (RFC 3828)
• SMP support for armv6
• New autofs-based automounter
• DRM code updated to match Linux 3.8.13, allowing multiple simultaneous X servers
• Support for 64-bit Linux binaries through the compatibility layer

Old version, no longer maintained : 11.x 10 October 2016[135] 30 September 2021[136]

• New version of NetMap[137]
• Support for the 64-bit ARM Architecture[137]
• umount(8) -N new flag which is used to forcefully unmount an NFS mounted filesystem
• crontab -f new flag added
• The ZFS filesystem has been updated to implement parallel mounting.
• The trim(8) utility has been added, which deletes content for blocks on flash-based storage devices that use wear-leveling algorithms.

Older version, yet still maintained : 12.x 11 December 2018[138][139]

• The ext2fs(5) filesystem has been updated to support full read/write support for ext4
• FreeBSD has changed the way graphics drivers are handled on amd64 and i386. Graphics drivers for modern ATI-AMD and Intel graphics cards are now available in the Ports Collection.
• The UFS/FFS filesystem has been updated to support check hashes to cylinder-group maps.

Current stable version : 13.x 13 April 2021[140][141]

• The clang, lld, and lldb utilities and compiler-rt, llvm, libunwind, and libc++ libraries have been updated to version 11.0.1.
• Removed the obsolete binutils 2.17 and gcc(1) 4.2.1 from the tree. All supported architectures now use the LLVM/clang toolchain.
• The kernel now supports in-kernel framing and encryption of Transport Layer Security (TLS) data on TCP sockets for TLS versions 1.0 through 1.3. Transmit offload via in-kernel crypto drivers is supported for MtE cipher suites using AES-CBC as well as AEAD cipher suites using AES-GCM. Receive offload via in-kernel crypto drivers is supported for AES-GCM cipher suites for TLS 1.2. Using KTLS requires the use of a KTLS-aware userland SSL library. The OpenSSL library included in the base system does not enable KTLS support by default, but support can be enabled by building with the WITH_OPENSSL_KTLS option
• The 64-bit ARM architecture known as arm64 or AArch64 is promoted to Tier-1 status for FreeBSD 13.

Version Release date Supported until Significant changes