FreeBSD Resources

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 […]

FreeBSD WiFi Development-Part 2: Working on a Driver FreeBSD WiFi Development Part 2: Working on a Driver By Tom Jones This is the second article in a series on hacking on WiFi in FreeBSD. In the first article, we introduced some terminology around WiFi/80211 networks, gave a crash course in a typical network architecture, and […]

Implementing a Quantum-Safe Website Implementing a Quantum-Safe Website By Gergely Poór Some time ago, at my current workplace, it was brought to my attention that traditional cryptography will no longer be considered secure. According to various sources, it is estimated that in the next 10 years, the advancements in quantum computing will reach a point […]

jones-bugs Writing Effective Bug Reports By Tom Jones A few years ago, our cherished former FreeBSD Journal editorial board member, Kristof Provost, wrote a great piece on the ideal way to write a bug report. Sadly, Michael W Lucas uses up our per-issue allotment of sarcasm early in the year, so to avoid going into […]

FreeBSD, Home Assistant, and rtl_433 FreeBSD, Home Assistant, and rtl_433 By Vanja Cvelbar A long time ago, I started playing with Home Assistant, and I’m very proud of a few automations. There is a motion sensor in the bathroom that turns on the light. If the sun has already set, the light turns on with […]

CHERIoT CHERIoT By David Chisnall The CHERI project has always had a close relationship with FreeBSD. It began from observing that Capsicum-based compartmentalization was great for new code but retrofitting it to existing libraries (with one process per library instance) was difficult for two reasons: First, libraries want to share complex data structures, which imposes […]

Starting Firewall Development: An Interview with Igor Ostapenko Starting FreeBSD Development An Interview with with Igor Ostapenko By Tom Jones TJ: There are numerous paths into working on FreeBSD, some through university courses and others through work experience. How did you learn about the project, and what initially drew you to Operating System development? IO: […]

Foundation Letter Welcome to the latest issue of the FreeBSD Journal! This time, we’re focusing on networking, not just the technology, but also the tools and improvements that help connect people and systems more easily and securely. In this issue, you’ll learn about Overlord, a fast and flexible way to deploy jails as you code. […]

April/May/June 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. EuroBSDCon 2025 September 25-28, 2025 Zagreb, Croatia https://2025.eurobsdcon.org/ This yearly conference gives the exceptional opportunity […]

We Get Letters We Get Letters By Michael W Lucas Dear Computer Touching Advice Columnist, FreeBSD’s jails have a few different ways to network. How do I decide which to use? —Baffled and Distressed Dear BAD, I’m writing this at BSDCan 2025. Two stories above us, someone is using a hammer drill. Traversing the concrete […]

Adventures in TCP/IP Static Pacing in FreeBSD By Randall Stewart and Michael Tüxen Previous articles described FreeBSD’s underlying support for pacing via its High Precision Timing System (HPTS) as well as a software pacing methodology within the RACK stack called Dynamic Goodput Pacing (DGP) which will dynamically pace at an optimal rate for the current […]

Embedded FreeBSD: Custom Hardware Embedded FreeBSD: Custom Hardware By Christopher R. Bowman When I started this journey using FPGAs and FreeBSD, I chose the Digilent Arty Z7-20 because it was among the least expensive of the Zynq-based boards and it had expandability. It has both a set of pins in the physical form factor of […]

FreeBSD WiFi Development FreeBSD WiFi Development Part 1 – Experimenting with WiFi By Tom Jones I have been working on WiFi in FreeBSD for the last 6 months through a project sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation. The main result of this n a port from OpenBSD of the iwx driver for Intel 80211ac/ax cards. Through […]

Netgraph for the Rest of Us Netgraph for the Rest of Us Making FreeBSD’s powerful networking framework accessible to everyone who runs jail and VM guests By Daniel J. Bell A few years ago, I wrote about leveraging FreeBSD in datacenters as a performant and cost-effective alternative to cloud options using tools in the FreeBSD […]

oviedo Overlord: Deploy Jails as Fast as You Code By Jesús Daniel Colmenares Oviedo When AppJail, a BSD-3 licensed open source framework entirely written in sh(1) and C to create isolated, portable and easy to deploy environments using FreeBSD jails that behave like an application, was created, my intention was to test ports so as […]

Installer Usability Installer Usability by Pierre Pronchery Dear reader, Writing this article, I have no idea who you are. This might be the first article you’ve ever read about FreeBSD; or you might already be well-versed with the system because you wrote half of it after all. I do not have the slightest idea about […]

Starting FreeBSD Development: An Interview with Kajetan Staszkiewicz Starting FreeBSD Development An Interview with Kajetan Staszkiewicz By Tom Jones TJ: Can you tell me a bit about yourself and your background with FreeBSD? KS: My name is Kajetan Staszkiewicz. I was born in 1984 in the magical city of Kraków in Poland. I was introduced […]

Jan/Feb/Mar 2025 Events Calendar 2025 Events Calendar By Anne Dickison BSD Events taking place through September 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. June 2025 FreeBSD Developer Summit June 11-12, 2025 Ottawa, Canada https://wiki.freebsd.org/DevSummit/202506 Join us for […]

html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” lang=”en-US”> Conference Report: FOSDEM 2025 Conference Report: FOSDEM 2025 by Tom Jones There are a lot of ways to be involved with Open Source software. Development is the obvious thing that will jump to everyone first, but many people aren’t developers and there are other ways to contribute. You can write code, but […]

Conference Report: Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit by Alice Sowerby I attended the Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit at the NetApp San Jose Campus in Santana Row. The event gave me a great opportunity to connect with the FreeBSD community, exchange ideas, and discuss ongoing projects. My main goal was to highlight the […]