The release candidate of FreeBSD 14.3 is now available for testing ahead of the official operating system release this month.

With FreeBSD 14.3-RC1 out on time, FreeBSD 14.3 remains on-schedule and is tracking to see its official release around 10 June.

FreeBSD 14.3 is bringing many package updates, security fixes, and select changes backported from the current FreeBSD 15 feature development. FreeBSD 15.0 itself will see its big feature release later in the year. Some specific FreeBSD 14.3 items to call out include PCI Express hot-plugging now on ARM64, the sound driver now allows allocating vchans-on-demand, various bootloaderi mprovements, the IX networking driver now supporting 1000BASE-BX SFP modules, support for crypto offload and 802.11n/802.11ac WiFi standards within the LinuxKPI wireless networking code, and other updates. See the [1]14.3 release notes for more details on the FreeBSD 14.3 changes.

As for this weekend's FreeBSD 14.3-RC1 release, the highlighted changes include:

- The default pkg.conf file now includes the FreeBSD-kmods repository.

- OCI images are now being published to Docker and GitHub repositories.

- The sound subsystem now terminates streams when vchans are closed; this can provide significant power savings.

- A struct packing issue causing wifi driver issues on arm64 has been fixed.

- A kernel panic in mac_do with INVARIANTS enabled has been fixed.

Downloads and more details on FreeBSD 14.3-RC1 via the [2]mailing list .



[1] https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.3R/relnotes/

[2] https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-stable/2025-June/002856.html