This year, I had the great privilege of receiving the FreeBSD Foundation travel grant to attend BSDCan.

The conference informally kicked off with the traditional gathering at the Father & Sons bar near the 90U residence on Tuesday.
The first day of the FreeBSD developer summit opened with Nicholas Carlini’s talk about LLM-driven security analysis in the FreeBSD kernel, setting the tone for the remainder of the first devsummit day. Alpha-Omega’s Michael Winser continued this discussion from an open-source maintainer’s perspective, outlining strategies for dealing with the torrential influx of LLM-reported vulnerabilities.
After a brief lunch break, the summit continued with Vince Milum’s presentation about building a Raspberry Pi-based GPS NTP server appliance using FreeBSD. The overview of his journey in applying FreeBSD to such an unorthodox use case was interesting and highlighted a few rough edges when using FreeBSD in embedded computing.
The summit continued with the Foundation’s yearly overview and an update from the srcmgr team, after which I spent some time catching up with a few colleagues in the hallways.
The first day was capped off by a pizza dinner at the 90U lounge.

The second day of the devsummit began with an overview of the current state of the FreeBSD project’s infrastructure and the ongoing efforts to expand its use of cloud resources. After two “Have/Need/Want” planning sessions, I attended Olivier Certner’s talk about his ongoing work in the scheduler.
The devsummit concluded with a round of shorter talks about planned work in the network stack, extended kernel errors, and virtual memory improvements from Netflix.
The day concluded with a hacking session at the 90U lounge that lasted well into the night.

The first day of the conference began with Sean Howard’s talk about accessibility tooling that allowed them to use OpenBSD while recovering from eye surgery.
Next up was Martin Vahlensieck’s talk about his new tool for creating temporary VMs on FreeBSD.
After a short lunch break, I attended Henning Brauer’s talk about OpenNTPD and its now 20+ years of history.
Following a short break in the quiet room, I attended Colin Percival’s talk about the turbulent FreeBSD 15.0 release process.
The day once again concluded in the hacker lounge, where I also spent some time talking to Mark Johnston and John Baldwin about our ongoing srcmgr activities.

The final day of the conference began with Allan Jude’s talk about the recently introduced ZFS AnyRAID feature.
Next up was Olivier Certner’s talk about the ongoing work to support hibernation on FreeBSD.
The talk explored the implementation details in a lot of depth, and I was particularly astonished by the amount of groundwork needed to add proper hibernate support in the kernel.
After lunch, I attended John Baldwin’s talk on thread-local storage. Another one of John’s fantastic ELF-related talks, it went into the gory details,
behind TLS support in various parts of FreeBSD.
The penultimate talk of the day was another by Martin Vahlensieck, this time dealing with a deep dive into a seemingly trivial operation – writing to /dev/null.
The talk was put together exceptionally well and did a great job of presenting complicated operating system concepts to a varied audience of users and developers.
The last talk of the day was Jaeyoon Choi’s talk about adding Universal Flash Storage support to FreeBSD, after which we slowly started heading to the closing reception.

Attending this year’s BSDCan provided me with plenty of new project ideas for the near future and reinvigorated my drive to contribute to the project.
Once again, thank you to the FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring my attendance this year.

The post BSDCan 2026 Travel Report – Novković first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.

The June 2026 FreeBSD DevSummit & BSDCan was again successfully recorded and streamed through longtime streaming sponsor ScaleEngine. The requested DevSummit 2 question microphone system kept our running around to a minimum and fit the two rows of DMS1160. We got to see CheriBSD hardware again, in fact, Brooks Davis presented from a CheriBSD box. This year, the DevSummit focused more on AI integration than in previous years. Community member Warner Losh, in particular, gave an interesting talk about how he has used AI to help resolve an issue he was facing. I will refer you to the video posted to the FreeBSD YouTube channel for more details.

Community members Michael Williams and AV Lead Andrew Fengler lent us the mixing boards, which gave us the control we needed, so speakers, both low and enthusiastic, were heard clearly. This year’s hardware collection included community-donated hardware and personal hardware lent for the event. BSDCan fundraiser-in-chief Michael Dexter brought everything from home that the TSA would let him, and my bags were so full, I didn’t have room for my customary roll(s) of gaffer tape.

BSDCan has been successfully building attendee numbers year over year, with just shy of 170 for 2026. My fondest memory of the conference as part of the very hard working organization committee, was seeing Henning pull our shawarma vendor aside to deliver effusive praise for what many agreed was a fantastic lunch on Saturday.

Other highlights:
– additional sleep support for the Framework laptop (Thank you, Devon!)
– one of the smoothest AV team activations I have ever seen at a conference.
– improved social media tie-in via both IRC and Discord
(Many thanks to Charlie Li, Setesh, & and a team of Discord volunteers)
– Nearly $2,000 raised for local charities.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have 4 days of videos to edit and post to the web.
Be well,
Patrick McEvoy bsdtv / bsdcan 2026 con chair

The post BSDCan 2026 Travel Report – Patrick McEvoy first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.

I’m really grateful to the FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring my trip to BSDCan 2026 in Ottawa. The conference ran for four days — two days of DevSummit, then two days of the main conference, with many interesting talks throughout. For me, it’s mainly a chance to talk with developers I don’t otherwise get to reach in day-to-day work. This was my third time attending, and I was happy to be back again. 

This year’s DevSummit felt a little different from previous years. A number of sessions touched on how AI is influencing project maintainability. Some of that influence is positive — vulnerability research came up as one example — but it’s also adding real burden on the reviewer side. Hearing different opinions from different people gave me a much broader view of the issue than I had going in. 

This was also my first DevSummit as a src committer, so on day two, I got to take part in “Have Need Want” — the usual BSDCan session for this — and present my own work for review along with my plans for the next release. That covered updates to our USB stack, LLVM, CPU power throttling, and bhyve. I also got some feedback privately afterward, which drew a bit of welcome attention from other developers. 

On the first day of the main conference, the talk I found most interesting was “Heterogeneous Scheduling on FreeBSD” by Minsoo Choo. It wasn’t really about the scheduler itself, but it got into something just as important: how heterogeneous core information should feed into the scheduler, and where and how that should happen.  It reminded me that my CPU throttling work needs the same kind of information.  Right now, the idea is to raise performance parameters as fast as possible under load, and back off while idle to save power. On a non-heterogeneous system, that only means tracking idle time. But on a heterogeneous system, cores differ in performance, which changes how we translate an abstract performance instruction into something a given core can act on — and that in turn affects how the cpufreq interface makes its decisions. I was glad to hear that there are already interfaces that provide heterogeneous-core hints for throttling, and I’m hoping to fold that into my future work. 

On day two, I went to “Return of the Segment: Thread Local Storage” by jhb@. Since I also work on LLVM ELF internals, it was great to finally get a clear picture of how Thread Local Storage actually works under our libc++ ABI. jhb@ walked through it well — starting from thread-local errno and building up to a compiler-guided ELF TLS design. Afterward, we talked about whether we should move errno over to compiler-based TLS. 

All in all, it was a great trip, with many good conversations with other developers.  Thanks again to the Foundation for making it possible for me to be there. 

Respectfully, 

ShengYi Hung

The post BSDCan 2026 Trip Report – ShengYi Hung first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.

During BSDCan, the FreeBSD Foundation holds its annual meeting and Board elections. Following this year’s meeting, we are pleased to welcome Dave Cottlehuber to the FreeBSD Foundation Board of Directors. Take a minute to read this interview with Dave to learn more about his involvement with FreeBSD and why he joined the Foundation Board of Directors. 

This transition also provides an opportunity to explain how the Foundation Board operates, how board members are elected, and how the Board’s role differs from Foundation staff and FreeBSD Project leadership. These distinctions are not always obvious from the outside, and we want to provide a clearer explanation of how the Foundation is governed.

The Foundation Board exists to help the organization make thoughtful, responsible decisions for the long term. It brings together people with different experiences and perspectives to help the Foundation stay focused, accountable, and connected to the broader FreeBSD ecosystem.

Project Leadership, Foundation Staff, and the Foundation Board

The FreeBSD Foundation is part of the broader FreeBSD ecosystem, working alongside the FreeBSD Project, contributors, users, companies, and community members to help FreeBSD thrive.

The FreeBSD Project leads the operating system’s technical direction, including the source tree, releases, technical priorities, and Project governance.

The Foundation is a separate nonprofit organization with its own programs, staff, and Board. Foundation staff carry out the organization’s day-to-day work, including software development work, advocacy, fundraising, communications, events, operations, grants, partnerships, and program management.

The Foundation Board provides governance, oversight, and strategic direction for the Foundation. The Board does not govern the FreeBSD Project, make technical decisions for FreeBSD, direct committers, or manage staff’s daily work. Instead, it approves the annual budget, helps guide the Foundation’s priorities, and ensures the organization is using its resources responsibly and in alignment with its mission.

Each group has a distinct role, but all are part of the same FreeBSD ecosystem and are working toward FreeBSD’s long-term success.

What the Foundation Board Does

The Foundation Board exists to help the organization make thoughtful, responsible decisions for the long term. It brings together people with different experiences and perspectives to help the Foundation stay focused, accountable, and connected to the broader FreeBSD ecosystem.

Board members review and approve the Foundation’s annual budget, provide input on organizational strategy, and help evaluate major priorities. They also support the Foundation’s work in areas such as fundraising, governance, sustainability, community relationships, and long-term planning.

A strong Board brings a mix of experience and perspective. This may include knowledge of FreeBSD and open source communities, nonprofit governance, finance, fundraising, legal and policy issues, business development, technology strategy, security, and organizational growth.

As the Foundation and the FreeBSD ecosystem continue to evolve, the Board considers what skills and perspectives would strengthen its ability to guide the organization. This helps ensure the Board remains well-positioned to provide thoughtful oversight and help the Foundation plan responsibly for the future.

How Board Members Are Identified and Elected

Board members are elected by the current Board at the Foundation’s annual meeting. 

The process leading up to the election is intentional and ongoing. Current board members discuss the needs of the organization, consider the experience already represented on the Board, and identify areas where additional expertise or perspective may be useful.

The Board also meets with individuals who may be interested in serving. These conversations may include people from within the FreeBSD community as well as individuals outside the community who bring relevant experience that could benefit the Foundation.

The goal is not simply to fill a seat. It is to build and maintain a Board that can provide thoughtful governance, contribute useful perspectives, and help guide the Foundation in ways that benefit the long-term health of FreeBSD.

Potential board members are generally people who understand the importance of FreeBSD, care about the Foundation’s work, and are willing to take an active role in helping the organization succeed.

What Board Members Are Expected to Do

Serving on the FreeBSD Foundation Board is a volunteer role, but it carries important responsibilities.

Board members are expected to attend meetings, review materials in advance, participate in discussions, and remain engaged between meetings. They are also expected to bring their experience, judgment, and networks to the Foundation’s work when those contributions are helpful.

This may include providing feedback on strategic questions, helping think through organizational challenges, supporting fundraising efforts, making introductions, or advising staff and fellow board members on areas where they have relevant expertise.

Effective board service does not mean directing staff’s daily work. It means helping ensure the Foundation has the resources, structure, guidance, and accountability needed to carry out its work well.

Why This Matters

Good governance is not always the most visible part of the Foundation’s work, but it is essential.

The Foundation is trusted with donor funds, community expectations, and an important role within the FreeBSD ecosystem. A strong Board helps ensure the Foundation is planning responsibly, making thoughtful decisions, and remaining focused on work that benefits FreeBSD.

As the needs of the FreeBSD ecosystem continue to grow and change, the Foundation Board will continue to look for the right mix of experience, perspective, and commitment to help guide the organization forward.

We are grateful to everyone who serves or has expressed interest in serving the Foundation in this capacity. While much of this work happens behind the scenes, it plays an important role in keeping the Foundation strong, sustainable, and prepared to contribute to FreeBSD’s long-term success.

The post Understanding the Foundation Board’s Role in the FreeBSD Ecosystem first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.

FreeBSD Community member and former Core Representative, Dave Cottlehuber, was elected to the FreeBSD Foundation Board during the Annual Meeting on June 15, 2026. We sat down with Dave to learn more about his history with FreeBSD and what he’s most looking forward to accomplishing during his tenure. 

Tell us a little about yourself, and how you got involved with FreeBSD?

I’m a relative newcomer to FreeBSD. I didn’t use it at university, and I only started my UNIX experience in early 2001, with an OpenBSD 2.8 CD and poster.

I spent most of my teens and early twenties climbing mountains and skiing down them. Computers were of little interest to me at that time, but midway through a Science degree, I found my niche, and eventually started working part time at the University computer centre. 

I remember a colleague eagerly rushing through with a FreeBSD CD, probably 3.something, in 1998 or 1999, but that was as close as I came.

The next decade was a move from New Zealand through France, Slovak Republic, and back to New Zealand, and in parallel, shifting from hands-on tech, into middle management, at various large corporations and telcos.

In 2010 I made an intentional decision to move away from that, and moved to working with open source software projects, and communities, in part to allow us to relocate back to Europe.

Around 2013 I actively switched to FreeBSD, and made it to my first BSDCan conference in 2016. The first people I met there were Peter Hessler from OpenBSD, Mark Linimon and Li-Wen Hsu from FreeBSD. With such friendly introductions, I was hooked!

Under Joseph Mingrone’s mentorship, I gained a ports commit bit in 2017, and became progressively more involved. In 2024, I began helping out with release engineering, under Colin Percival’s watchful eye, and in mid 2024 I also joined the FreeBSD Core team, for my first term.

This brought me into contact with a much broader range of people, within the community, the Foundation, and the wider project, and the complexities of both understanding and running such a distributed group of people.

Why are you passionate about serving on the FreeBSD Foundation Board?

The FreeBSD community was an unexpected, but very welcome, engagement later in my life. 

Much of our daily commercial work is necessarily focused on delivering to shareholders and customers, and it’s both satisfying and important to do things for the long term, to contribute to the common good. I get a great deal of personal satisfaction out of helping and seeing people, and the project itself, thrive.

What excites you about our work?

The Foundation operates on a longer timescale than most of us get to work on day-to-day — funding development that wouldn’t otherwise happen, supporting infrastructure, advocacy, and the conferences that hold the community together. Bringing people and organisations together for that kind of long-term work doesn’t happen overnight, and being part of it is a unique opportunity.

What are you hoping to bring to the organization and the community through your new leadership role?

I don’t see this as a new leadership role so much as a continuation — a branch, if you will, of my existing involvement. Coming to the board directly from Core, I hope to help strengthen the connections between the Foundation, the developers, our users, and the wider community, and to keep fostering a shared sense of identity and purpose across them all.

How do you see your background and experience complementing the current board? 

Helping people understand each other’s strengths and perspectives, and finding ways to be successful together as FreeBSD, is challenging work — and genuinely rewarding.

I’ve worked on a number of transition and transformation programmes over the years, both technical and people-focused, and more recently in open source community building. I’m looking to bring both a community context and an active contributor’s viewpoint to the board, and to continue working across ‘the whole project’ in the widest possible sense.

The post FreeBSD Foundation Welcomes New Board Member: Dave Cottlehuber first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.

Teaching others about FreeBSD and helping it grow doesn’t require a developer background — it just takes someone willing to show up and talk about why this project matters. Whether that’s presenting at a local meetup or bringing FreeBSD into a classroom, community advocacy is one of the most effective ways we grow the project.

Is There a Local Event Where You Could Represent FreeBSD?

Is there a meetup, conference, or user group in your area where FreeBSD could use a voice? We’re always looking for community members willing to represent the project locally, whether that means giving a talk, staffing a table, or simply striking up conversations about FreeBSD. If you’re speaking about FreeBSD at an upcoming event, let us know; we can help spread the word, and our Travel Grant program may be able to help cover the cost of getting there.

Thinking About Hosting a Table or Booth?

If you’d like to run a FreeBSD community table at an event, you don’t have to figure it out from scratch. We’ve put together a set of Community Table Guidelines covering everything from talking points and etiquette to what to bring and how to handle tricky questions, so you can focus on the conversations instead of the logistics. Reach out to marketing@freebsdfoundation.org for a copy, and don’t forget to grab logos, stickers, and other materials before you go.

Bring FreeBSD to Your Class or Club

We’re also launching a new way to connect with students directly. If you’re a student who’d like someone from the FreeBSD community to speak virtually to your class or club, you can now request a virtual speaker through our new speaker request form. Whether your group wants an introduction to FreeBSD, a walkthrough of installing it for the first time, or a conversation about careers in open source, we’ll match you with someone from the community who can join your class or meeting remotely.

Advocacy doesn’t have to be complicated. A five-minute conversation with a professor, a slide deck at a local user group, or a sticker handed out at a hackathon all move the project forward. Ready to get involved? 

Request a virtual speaker, tell us about your event, or reach out to marketing@freebsdfoundation.org with questions.

The post Represent FreeBSD in Your Community first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.

The post EuroBSDCon 2026 Travel Grant Open first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.

Graphics support in FreeBSD has reached a milestone with the drm-kmod port now including the Linux 6.12 (LTS) graphics driver. This version of the port works with FreeBSD 15.1 onwards. 

The post FreeBSD Graphics Port Upgraded to Linux 6.12  first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.

About the project

The FreeBSD Foundation has launched its AI-assisted Vulnerability Discovery Project with the key goal of reducing the number of exploitable vulnerabilities in the FreeBSD source code.

The 6-month project is being funded by a grant from the Alpha Omega project. The funds will be used to engage FreeBSD Security Team members under fixed-term contracts to find and patch vulnerabilities. The Security Team’s access to publicly available AI models and tokens will be provided free of charge. AI will be used for vulnerability discovery and analysis only, all patches will be manually created.  

Why this is important now

Open source codebases have become a key target for AI-assisted vulnerability scanning and this has reduced the effective time to exploitation to 0 days. The FreeBSD Project has already received a number of credible vulnerability reports that are attributable to AI-enabled security tools. 

The implications of this include: 

• It is possible for malicious actors to find exploitable vulnerabilities and use them before anyone else is aware of them. This increases the risk for open source users and harms trust.
• Anyone with a moderate technical skillset can find and report vulnerabilities if they use an AI-assisted security tool. This can lead to a rapid increase in report numbers and a potential decrease in report quality. Dealing with this change in dynamic can be challenging for open source projects. 

These risks have been recognized by many in the software industry – the Linux Foundation security initiative that this project falls under was funded by donations from Anthropic, AWS, GitHub, Google, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and OpenAI. The initiative has the explicit goal of improving the security of open source software. 

What the project covers

The FreeBSD Foundation has received a $250k grant to secure time from key members of the FreeBSD Security team and to cover time from other staff as needed to support their work. Accessing AI models for vulnerability analysis will be free of charge for the duration of the project.

The project’s goals are to reduce the number of vulnerabilities in the FreeBSD source code and to develop practical approaches that will improve efficiency in vulnerability management.

AI will be used to find vulnerabilities that will then be manually triaged, validated and patched. As this work is carried out, there will be opportunities to improve and automate elements of the FreeBSD Security Team’s infrastructure. Some examples include: improving fuzzing capabilities for pre-merge, stable, and release branches, and for vulnerability patches, or automatically triaging vulnerability reports. This work will also be within the project’s scope. 

Initially, the FreeBSD kernel will be the focus of the project, followed by the base system userland, and the ports tree. All parts of FreeBSD may be in scope and will be addressed in priority order as time allows. 

The project team will also liaise with other similar projects being funded by Alpha Omega to mutually share and improve the work being done. 

“We are grateful to Alpha-Omega for supporting this important work. Their investment in our AI-Assisted Vulnerability Discovery project recognizes FreeBSD’s role as a critical component of global digital infrastructure. As the volume of vulnerability reports continues to grow, this funding will help us strengthen our ability to efficiently assess, prioritize, and respond to security issues, ensuring FreeBSD remains a secure and dependable platform for the many individuals, organizations, and products that rely on it worldwide.” – Deb Goodkin. Executive Director, FreeBSD Foundation.

“The FreeBSD Security Team has been receiving an increasing number of vulnerability reports from researchers leveraging AI tooling, and that volume continues to grow. This funding augments our volunteer Security Team, giving us the capacity to find, triage, and fix vulnerabilities rather than only responding to those reported to us.” – Gordon Tetlow, Security Officer, The FreeBSD Project

Project partners

The project is possible thanks to the support of many parties. In addition to the funding already mentioned, there are other important partners who will be helping to ensure a successful and impactful project. 

Netflix has agreed to help test and validate changes, particularly those involving the network stack. NetApp and Verisign will also provide input on which functional areas should be focused on for vulnerability searching, collaborate on AI-assisted scanning, and help with regression testing and validation of prospective patches.

There are also some security researchers and FreeBSD vendors that have access to Claude Mythos Preview through Project Glasswing, and they have offered to use it for supplemental discovery and analysis on our behalf where practical.

A number of other open source projects are also running similar efforts. These include Ruby, Node.js, and PHP.

Find out more

To follow the progress of the project and to access more information, please visit https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/all-projects/tree/main/AI-assisted-vulnerability-discovery

The post FreeBSD AI-assisted Vulnerability Discovery Project launch first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.

From April 24–26, the FreeBSD community held its first regional hackathon in the Frankfurt area (Germany). The three-day event brought together 25 attendees, including seasoned project committers and guests interested in learning more about the FreeBSD community.

Participants traveled from several European countries to gather at the sponsored Innovation Lab venue. The location proved ideal for an international gathering, offering excellent transit connections across Europe via the Frankfurt (FRA) airport, regional train networks, and major highways. Hacking sessions began early in the morning and regularly continued late into the evening.

The event resulted in several notable contributions to the Project:

• 120 Bugs Closed: Attendees made significant progress on the FreeBSD PR queue, closing 120 bugs across the base system and ports collection.
• SBOM Implementation: Significant work was completed to successfully implement Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) functionality within FreeBSD, enhancing the platform’s supply chain security and compliance capabilities.
• German Translation of Sylve: Participants completed the German translation of Sylve, improving accessibility for local users.

In addition to the technical work, the event served as an opportunity for networking and collaboration across different areas of the Project. The FreeBSD Foundation sponsored a midday barbecue lunch, allowing attendees to discuss ongoing development and future planning in an informal setting.

We want to thank our location sponsors for hosting the event, the FreeBSD Foundation for providing financial support for the catering, and all the participants who traveled to make this hackathon a success. Given the productivity and positive turnout, we are looking forward to doing this again next year. 

The post Recap of the April 2026 Frankfurt Area FreeBSD Hackathon – Sven Ruediger  first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.