FreeBSD Resources

Packaging, CloudInit, and Revisiting “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” An interview with Baptiste Daroussin Tom Jones Tom Jones: You’ve been using FreeBSD since 1998 and have been a committer since 2010. How has the project changed from when you started using it on the desktop?   Baptiste Daroussin: I don’t think it has […]

Come Friendly SBOMs Leveraging software bill of materials for your benefit and protection Alice Sowerby I was going to give this piece the title How I learned to stop worrying and love the SBOM but I discovered that this American witticism has already been used extensively for the topic. Instead, I decided to pivot to […]

Welcome to the Q2 issue of the FreeBSD Journal. This issue focuses on improving software quality. The articles look at several ways that this work shows up across the FreeBSD ecosystem, from debugging memory safety bugs with CHERI on FreeBSD, to interviews with people working on different parts of the system and community. You’ll also […]

Getting started with WiFi developmentPart 3: Debugging The FreeBSD WiFi stack is amenable to interrogation. Tom Jones In a series on starting WiFi development, the debugging part easily could have been the first, second, and third sections and we might never have looked at driver code. WiFi has all the features that make debugging difficult: […]

Debugging with CHERI CHERI is designed to improve the security of both existing and future software. John Baldwin CHERI is a new security-oriented processor technology. Applying principles from historical capability systems, CHERI aims to improve the security of existing software written in C and C++ by extending both implicit and explicit C/C++ pointers to include […]

Events Calendar 2026 Events Calendar (Summer) By Anne Dickison BSD Events taking place through September 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. FreeBSD Hackathon 2026 September 4-6, 2026 Berlin, Germany https://wiki.freebsd.org/Hackathon/202609 Join the FreeBSD community for the […]

Modern Java on FreeBSD An interview with Harald Eilertsen Tom Jones In September 2025, Harald Eilertsen gave a talk at EuroBSDcon titled “Improving OpenJDK on FreeBSD – Where we are, and what I’ve learned“. Harald has been working with the upstream OpenJDK project on improving the support for FreeBSD. Sitting with Harald is Tom Jones. […]

How does one improve software quality? Most people’s failings resemble the prior art of failure. Michael W. Lucas Dear Letters Column, You’ve said how your readers should spend their time eliminating code, how computers were a mistake, going on and on and on about how bad computing is. No weaseling this time. The topic of […]

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 […]