After six months of active development, the The FreeBSD team has released the new version of "FreeBSD 14.3"", a release that introduces system stability improvements and expands support for modern hardware, virtualization, and cloud environments. This new version of FreeBSD 14.3 will be officially supported until June 30, 2026, while its predecessor, FreeBSD 14.2, will be maintained until September 30, 2025.
The 14 branch as a whole will continue to receive updates until November 2028, while the next release, FreeBSD 14.4, is planned for March 2026, and the first release of FreeBSD 15 will arrive in December 2025, dropping support for 32-bit architectures.
Major New Features in FreeBSD 14.3
One of the most notable changes is in the LinuxKPI layer, which Now includes support for Wi-Fi 4 (802.11n) and Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac), also allowing encryption operations to be offloaded to compatible network adapters. This improves performance and reduces CPU usage by integrating directly into the iwlwifi driver, derived from the Linux kernel source code.
As to rtw88 driver for Realtek chips (such as RTL8723DE and RTL8821CE), has been reached a fully functional state, including important fixes such as the elimination of memory leaks. Additionally, support for Intel 9260/9560 Bluetooth has been added via firmware and port updates.
In addition, FreeBSD 14.3 introduces hot plug support for PCIe cards on ARM64 systems, which facilitates the use of hardware in virtualized or embedded environments. Container images in OCI format have also begun to be published on Docker and GitHub, opening up new possibilities for its use as a base system in modern container-based infrastructures.
New utilities and improvements in jail
In FreeBSD 14.3 The setcred system call has been added to handle automatic changes to credentials such as euid, ruid, and groups, and a new utility called mdo, similar to su, that uses this call to securely switch users without resorting to setuid.
Also Sysctl handling has been improved with new options for binding variables to jails specific, allowing for more granular management of network and kernel configurations in virtual environments. For example, it's now possible to configure parameters like net.fibs directly within a jail with commands like sysctl -j foo net.fibs=2.
New features in networking, security, and system performance
FreeBSD 14.3 introduces significant improvements to several critical subsystems, such as the pf packet filter, which can now be set to default drop mode via the new net.pf.default_to_drop parameter. The virtual network stack (vnet) allows parameters to be changed from the boot loader, facilitating advanced configurations from system boot. Additionally, the sound subsystem now dynamically assigns virtual channels (vchan) on demand, improving the recording and playback experience.
In terms of connectivity, Improved support for Ethernet drivers ix, igc, and bnxt, as well as hot-plugging on EC2 (x86 and Graviton). Synchronization with the Linux 6.14 kernel in the rtw88 and rtw89 drivers ensures improved performance on Realtek Wi-Fi cards.
Furthermore, hTools like ps and grep have been adjusted to align with POSIX standards: ps -U now filters by the real user ID (RUID), and grep stops following symbolic links by default in recursive searches.
Last but not least, it's worth mentioning that FreeBSD 14.3 includes warnings about components that will soon be deprecated:
- gvinum, the legacy logical volume manager, will be removed in FreeBSD 15. It is recommended to migrate to modern alternatives such as ZFS, gmirror, or gconcat.
- The syscons console driver, which is incompatible with UEFI and UTF-8 and still relies on the kernel's global lock, will also be removed in the future, possibly in FreeBSD 16.
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can consult the details in the following link
Download and Get FreeBSD 14.3
For those interested in power Get this new version of FreeBSD 14.3, you should know that it is distributed in images designed for various architectures, ranging from AMD, i386 and multiple PowerPC variants to ARM and RISC-V processors.
Specific builds have also been generated for virtualization and cloud computing environments, with support for Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, and Vagrant, as well as formats compatible with QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw.