December 10, 2025

Written as part of the FreeBSD Project’s 3rd 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 third 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 451 src, 71 ports, and 25 doc commits that identified the FreeBSD Foundation as a sponsor.

Refer to the following report entries describing much of that committed development work:

Other highlights include:

  • Improved virtual memory scalability, allowing multiple processes to load shared libraries in parallel.
  • Greater UFS reliability on very large filesystems (with more than 2 billion inodes).
  • Support for systems with over 4 TB of RAM, including a reworked Kernel Virtual Address (KVA) layout tailored for the 57-bit address space (LA57) architecture.
  • Kqueue inheritance across fork(2).
  • A new safeguard (noshutdown) to help prevent accidental system shutdown.
  • Simplified and more reliable filesystem rename operations.
  • A fix for amd64 pmap panics under low-memory conditions.
  • Numerous fixes for race conditions in timeout(1).
  • A new EXTERROR(9) interface, standardizing how external applications can report detailed error information.

FreeBSD, under the management of the Foundation, participated in its 21st consecutive Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program. All twelve projects were successfully completed.

Four of those GSoC participants contributed report entries:

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 3rd quarter of 2025 included representing FreeBSD at open source events, producing more technical tutorials and working on the upcoming November 2025 FreeBSD Vendor Summit. Take a look at just a few of the ways the Foundation helped advocate for FreeBSD in Q3 of 2025:

  • Sponsored and attended EuroBSDcon 2025, held in Zagreb, Croatia; September 25-28, 2025.
  • Members of the Foundation team presented at the Open Source Summit, Europe, August 25-27, 2025, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
  • Planning continued for the November 2025 FreeBSD Vendor Summit, taking place November 6-7, 2025 in San Jose, CA. Registration is open and the schedule is available.
  • Published the following blogs and videos to help to inform and educate the community:

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!