Projects | FreeBSD Foundation

The FreeBSD Foundation provides support, through funding and resources, for development activities of the FreeBSD operating system that focus on improving its security, performance, and usability. Working alongside the community, we are all working to ensure FreeBSD’s long-term viability.
The development projects worked on by the Foundation are determined by a number of factors including: discussions with the Core team on development gaps that need to be filled, the overall effect the development work will have on improving the Project, and the funding available from the Foundation. Below are the projects.
To get involved, visit the FreeBSD Project page.
Add bounds-safety annotations to the FreeBSD kernel’s TCP/IP stack to help detect and prevent out-of-bounds memory access, improving security while maintaining compatibility with existing code and toolchains. The project will focus on potentially vulnerable areas of the TCP/IP stack and add testing and continuous integration coverage to support the changes.
The European Union’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) establishes new cybersecurity requirements for products with digital elements sold within the EU, with full compliance required by December 2027. While FreeBSD itself is outside the CRA’s direct regulatory scope, the FreeBSD Foundation is classified under the law as an open source steward. As a result, the Foundation is leading a focused, year-long readiness initiative to prepare the Foundation, the Project, and the broader community for the Act’s implications.
This page serves as the central resource for CRA-related updates, guidance, FAQs, and information for contributors, manufacturers, and other stakeholders engaging with FreeBSD.
As part of the larger laptop improvements project, we are developing support for the newer S0ix states for sleep/hibernation. Many modern laptops are using S0ix versus the older S3 standard. With S0ix, the operating system is responsible for figuring out what devices need to be put to sleep before the CPU can be turned off, and the firmware will automatically turn off the CPU only once all the requirements are met.
Implement the more commonly used MIT Kerberos to improve interoperability with other operating systems.
Improve virtualization API, libvirt, with the ability to manage the full lifecycle of bhyve virtual machines, including creation, startup, shutdown, and destruction. The project will also include libvirt support of basic networking configuration for bhyve VMs.
The project will develop a Proxmox-like graphical interface for FreeBSD, specifically designed for managing bhyve and jails. The system will leverage Golang for backend development and Svelte for a modern, responsive, frontend.
The goal is to provide an intuitive, powerful GUI that simplifies virtualization and containerization tasks. A modern GUI will make FreeBSD more accessible to administrators and competitive in the virtualization space.
Historically, FreeBSD has been seen as a rock solid, secure and trustworthy server operating system. There’s no denying that it can also be a desktop operating system. The project has long recognized a desktop use case for FreeBSD, so the Userland Development initiative aims to improve the user experience. This fits in with the larger sponsored effort to improve FreeBSD on modern laptops.
The main goal of this project is to improve OpenJDK support on FreeBSD/amd64 and FreeBSD/arm64. This will be done by working with both the FreeBSD and OpenJDK communities to identify and address issues and missing features. Whenever possible, work will be submitted upstream and a major goal is to have the OpenJDK JCK test suite pass on FreeBSD.
The project also emphasizes fostering a strong Java ecosystem on FreeBSD by engaging with the community through the FreeBSD Enterprise Working Group, regular updates via mailing lists and blog posts, and calls for ideas and testing. It also includes setting up and maintaining continuous integration for OpenJDK on FreeBSD.
The Open Container Initiative (OCI) develops open industry standards for cloud native container formats and runtimes, ensuring platform consistency. An OCI working group is defining these standards for FreeBSD, with implementations using jails and potentially lightweight VMs with FreeBSD’s bhyve hypervisor (which would allow support for other operating systems besides FreeBSD in a container on a FreeBSD host).
The project will focus on enabling apparent modifications to read-only filesystems, supporting multiple jails sharing the same base and simplifying their upgrades, and facilitating container scenarios with layered, pre-packaged images. The UnionFS project on FreeBSD, led by Olivier Certner, is focused on enhancing and stabilizing UnionFS's capabilities, especially for scenarios involving layered filesystems, jails, containers, and storage optimization.
The OpenZFS Hierarchical Rate Limits project for FreeBSD aims to significantly enhance the OpenZFS file system by introducing hierarchical rate limits. Configurable similarly to quotas, these rate limits will control the number of read/write operations and the read/write bandwidth, resulting in improved system performance and better resource management.
A new collaborative project between Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and The FreeBSD Foundation has commenced to develop a comprehensive FreeBSD AMD IOMMU (Input-Output Memory Management Unit) driver. This initiative aims to enable FreeBSD to fully support systems with over 256 cores, incorporating advanced features such as CPU mapping and bhyve integration.
The first challenge for users trying out a new operating system is the installation process, which shapes their initial impression. Nowadays, OS installers usually have a graphical interface, as seen in popular systems such as RedHat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, and Debian GNU/Linux. This graphical method is also common in UNIX systems like FreeBSD. Regardless of the user's technical skills, the installation p