September 10, 2025

Written as part of the FreeBSD Project’s 2nd Quarter 2025 Status Report, check out the highlights of what we did to help FreeBSD last quarter:

The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to advancing FreeBSD through both technical and non-technical support. Funded entirely by donations, the Foundation supports software development, infrastructure, security, and collaboration efforts; organizes events and developer summits; provides educational resources; and represents the FreeBSD Project in legal matters.

Here are some of the ways we supported FreeBSD in the second quarter of 2025.

OS Improvements

The Foundation continued to support two major initiatives: the Laptop Support and Usability project (in collaboration with Quantum Leap Research) and an infrastructure modernization project commissioned by the Sovereign Tech Agency. For background on both efforts, see the 2025Q1 quarterly status report.

Throughout the quarter, there were 536 src, 64 ports, and 41 doc commits that identified the FreeBSD Foundation as a sponsor.

Here is a sampling of that work and other sponsored efforts:

  • Various improvements to libvirt’s support for bhyve, including:

    • An initial port of the libvirt integration testing project, libvirt-tck, enabling test execution against libvirt’s bhyve driver on FreeBSD.

    • Enhancements to the bhyve driver to improve compatibility and testability.

    • Support for virtio-rnd devices, NVRAM configuration, and extended domain usage statistics (under review).

    • Initial support for pf(4)-based NAT networking (under review).

  • Improved handling of tlsbase (thread-local storage) on amd64, making it more reliable across context switches and benefiting applications that manually manage TLS, such as Wine.

  • Runtime linker improvements, including support for the -z initfirst flag. This addresses longstanding issues with RTLD_DEEPBIND and provides better control over symbol resolution and initialization order in dynamically linked applications.

  • Enhanced ptrace usability by enabling transient PT_ATTACH behavior. This reduces friction for debugging tools and eliminates spurious EINTR errors that could interrupt or break tracing workflows.

  • kqueue introspection support by extending procstat(1) to report kqueue state, improving observability into how processes use kernel event notification mechanisms

  • Design and implementation of EXTERROR, a mechanism that reports extended error information to userspace, augmenting the usual errno value. This enables applications to retrieve more detailed diagnostics beyond standard error codes.

Other sponsored efforts are covered in separate report entries:

The Foundation is managing FreeBSD’s participation in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program. Twelve projects were accepted this year.

Continuous Integration and Workflow Improvement

As part of our continued support of the FreeBSD Project, the Foundation supports a full-time staff member dedicated to improving the Project’s continuous integration system and test infrastructure.

Advocacy

Advocacy work in the 2nd quarter of 2025 included hosting events, launching a new series of video guides and bringing on a new Marketing Coordinator. Florine Kamdem brings social media, branding, and IT skills. She uses storytelling to craft digital campaigns that spark interest and build connection within the community. Read more about Florine, and check out just a few of the ways the Foundation helped advocate for FreeBSD in Q2 of 2025:

Fundraising

Thank you to everyone who gave us a financial contribution last quarter to help fund our work to support the Project. We are grateful for your investment in FreeBSD!

Please consider supporting our efforts in 2025 by making a donation here: https://freebsdfoundation.org/donate/.

Or, check out our Partnership opportunities here: https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/freebsd-foundation-partnership-program/.

Legal/FreeBSD IP

The Foundation owns the FreeBSD trademarks, and it is our responsibility to protect them. We also provide legal support for the core team to investigate questions that arise.

Go to https://freebsdfoundation.org to find more about how we support FreeBSD and how we can help you!