Colin Percival who took over as the release engineering lead for FreeBSD last November has come up with two important changes for this BSD operating system's release engineering process.

FreeBSD is reducing the amount of time they support a stable branch from five years to four years. FreeBSD 15 and later will see just a four year support window rather than five to ease the maintenance burden with maintainers.

The other important change is putting out a more predictable schedule of FreeBSD releases. A minor release from one of the supported FreeBSD stable branches will now happen most quarters.

Percival has worked through improvements with the release engineering team to cut down on the number of release candidates needed to help streamline the process. The team has the capacity to put out a release every three months and to track for a new ".0" release every two years.

The plan for FreeBSD moving forward is now:

Release EoL

13.3: Mar 2024 Dec 2024

14.1: Jun 2024 Mar 2025

13.4: Sep 2024 Jun 2025

14.2: Dec 2024 Sep 2025

13.5: Mar 2025 Apr 2026*

14.3: Jun 2025 Jun 2026

15.0: Dec 2025 Sep 2026

14.4: Mar 2026 Dec 2026

15.1: Jun 2026 Mar 2027

14.5: Sep 2026 Jun 2027

15.2: Dec 2026 Sep 2027

14.6: Mar 2027 Nov 2028*

15.3: Jun 2027 Jun 2028

16.0: Dec 2027 Sep 2028

15.4: Mar 2028 Dec 2028

16.1: Jun 2028 Mar 2029

15.5: Sep 2028 Jun 2029

16.2: Dec 2028 Sep 2029

15.6: Mar 2029 Dec 2029

16.3: Jun 2029 Jun 2030

17.0: Dec 2029 Sep 2030

More details on the FreeBSD release process update via [1]this mailing list post .



[1] https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-announce/2024-July/000143.html