FreeBSD Resources

We Get Letters We Get Letters By Michael W Lucas Dear Person Who’s Been Running FreeBSD for Longer than I’ve Been Alive, Commercial operating systems are increasingly intrusive and exploitative. I want a better life. How do I get started with desktop BSD? —Avoiding Wasting One’s Life Oh AWOL, my succulent summer child, You’re the […]

Let Sleeping CPUs Lie — S0ix Let Sleeping CPUs Lie — S0ix By Aymeric Wibo Modern laptops promise a kind of magic. Shut the lid or press the sleep button, toss it in a backpack, and hours, days, or weeks later, it should wake up as if nothing happened with little to no battery drain. […]

Consolations for Kernel Hackers Consolations for Kernel Hackers By Tom Jones You turn the machine on, it buzzes and whirrs, and there is a chime. The display jumps to a bright, but black screen, a first sign that the sounds aren’t just distant movements. Some text from Phoenix or American scrolls by, and then you […]

Foundation Letter Dear FreeBSD Journal Community, I’m excited to share our latest issue of the FreeBSD Journal, highlighting FreeBSD on modern desktops and laptops, which has been an ongoing priority for the Foundation. Over the years, the FreeBSD Foundation has consistently invested in improving the FreeBSD desktop experience, with a goal of making it more […]

Events Calendar 2026 Events Calendar By Anne Dickison BSD Events taking place through June 2026 Please send details of any FreeBSD related events or events that are of interest for FreeBSD users which are not listed here to freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org. Hackathon 202604 April 24 – 26, 2026 Wiesbaden, Germany https://wiki.freebsd.org/Hackathon/202604 We’re pleased to share that planning […]

How the Foundation’s Laptop Support & Usability Project Came Together How the Foundation’s Laptop Support & Usability Project Came Together By Deb Goodkin F or years, we kept hearing the same thing from users: yes, FreeBSD can run on a laptop, but getting there was not always easy. People could make it work, but it […]

Duplicating your System Duplicating your System Using duplicity to back up your FreeBSD desktop By Jason Tubnor Y ou’ve just installed your new FreeBSD desktop (or laptop), got it just the way you like it, and are about to start work on that new novel or porting a new piece of software to FreeBSD that […]

Adventures in TCP/IP: Improving TCP’s Responses to Reordering Adventures in TCP/IP: Improving TCP’s Responses to Reordering By Randall Stewart This column will be slightly different from the others in this series. It describes a set of problems that arose with the use of TCP and provides a walk-through of how the problems were troubleshooted, illustrating […]

A centralized resource page for new FreeBSD users, showing how to get started with installation guides, desktop and virtual machine resources, and community links.

Foundation Letter Letter from the Foundation Thank you for spending time with the FreeBSD Journal this year. We’re grateful for our readers, as well as the authors, editors, and volunteers who bring each issue to life. Your passion and effort keep the Journal going and help share the work happening across the Project. Wishing you […]

Events Calendar 2026 Events Calendar By Anne Dickison BSD Events taking place through March 2026 Please send details of any FreeBSD related events or events that are of interest for FreeBSD users which are not listed here to freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org. Code and ComplianceFOSDEM Edition January 26, 2026 Brussels, Belgium https://www.eclipse-foundation.events/event/code-compliance-2026/ Join us in Brussels for the […]

We Get Letters We Get Letters By Michael W Lucas Dear Why Do They Let You Write This Column, FreeBSD 15 is now out, and it includes the base system as packages. In the January/February 2022 issue of the FreeBSD Journal, you spent your entire column ranting about pkgbase. You were wrong. Obviously wrong. Is […]

Embedded FreeBSD: Building U-boot Embedded FreeBSD: Building U-boot By Christopher R. Bowman A reader wrote to me that he had trouble building U-boot, so I thought I’d walk through the process since I wanted to bring up a different Zynq board and would have to go through it anyway. I need to provide a disclaimer: […]

Credentials Transitions with mdo(1) and mac_do(4) Credentials Transitions with mdo(1) and mac_do(4) By Olivier Certner In this article, we explore how the mdo(1) program can be used to easily and quickly launch a new process with different credentials and how system administrators can enable credentials transitions initiated by unprivileged users by leveraging the mac_do(4) kernel […]

FreeBSD and Google Summer of Code 2025 FreeBSD and Google Summer of Code 2025 By Joe Mingrone T he successful completion of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2025 marks FreeBSD’s 21st consecutive year participating in the program. Three factors made this year stand out. First, we received 64 applications, which is more than double last […]

Vox FreeBSD: How Sound Works Vox FreeBSD: How Sound Works By Christos Margiolis Sound support for FreeBSD began in 1993, when Jordan K. Hubbard imported the generic Linux sound driver into FreeBSD, later known as the VoxWare sound drivers, written by Hannu Savolainen. Several new versions of the VoxWare drivers were imported (and modified) into […]

printf(“Hello, srcmgr\n”); printf(“Hello, srcmgr\n”); By Mark Johnston FreeBSD developers and devsummit attendees have likely heard of the newish srcmgr (“source manager”) team at some point. But seeing as it’s been a year or so since srcmgr started having regular calls, it seems time to introduce ourselves a bit more widely. srcmgr is a team of […]

Universal Flash Storage on FreeBSD Universal Flash Storage on FreeBSD By Jaeyoon Choi Universal Flash Storage (UFS) is a high-performance, low-power storage interface designed for mobile, automotive, and embedded environments. Today, UFS is widely deployed and has become the successor to eMMC in most Android flagship smartphones. It also appears in some tablets, laptops, and […]

FreeBSD 15.0:Fixes and Features FreeBSD 15.0:Fixes and Features By John Baldwin The FreeBSD community continues to push forward with the release of 15.0. This release includes numerous features, refinements, and bugfixes relative to 14.0, which was released in November of 2023. Highlights of some of the changes are listed below, but more details can be […]

July/August/September Events Calendar 2025 Events Calendar By Anne Dickison BSD Events taking place through November 2025 Please send details of any FreeBSD related events or events that are of interest for FreeBSD users which are not listed here to freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org. OpenZFS User and Developer Summit 2025 October 25-28, 2025 Portland, OR https://openzfs.org/wiki/OpenZFS_Developer_Summit_2025 This year, the […]

Foundation Letter Welcome to the third FreeBSD Journal issue of 2025! Summer has ended in the northern hemisphere, along with the resulting change in weather in many places. In the FreeBSD project, we are racing towards the finish line for 15.0 with the release scheduled near the end of the year. Our next issue will […]

We Get Letters We Get Letters By Michael W Lucas Greetings, Letters Columnist! Before you treat my letter like those IRS notices and fling it into /dev/null, please note that — if I timed this correctly — a delivery driver will be knocking on your door any minute now with a gallon of handmade gelato, […]

Conference Report: BSDCan 2025 Conference Report: BSDCan 2025 by Christos Margiolis This year, I gave a talk at BSDCan 2025 titled “Vox FreeBSD: How sound(4) works”. I arrived in Montréal on June 9, two days before the conference, but did not do much that day except rest. The next day, June 10, I took the […]

Embedded FreeBSD: Looking Back and Forward Embedded FreeBSD: Looking Back and Forward By Christopher R. Bowman We’ve covered quite a lot of ground over the last year. While I hazard to guess that most people run FreeBSD on conventional AMD64-based PCs, we examined one of the embedded boards that FreeBSD works on: the Digilent Arty […]