FreeBSD 12.4 Released

Revision: 0.0: Initial release announcement. Revision: 1.1a: Correct AWS URLs and announcement date. Revision: 1.1b: Correct duplicated RPI-B entry, adding RPI2.

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 12.4-RELEASE. This is the fifth release of the stable/12 branch.

• The ena(4) kernel driver has been updated to 2.6.1.

• The if_epair(4) driver now allows multiple cores to be used to process traffic to improve performance.

• The unbound(8) utility has been updated to version 1.16.3.

• The telnetd(8) daemon has been deprecated.

• The tcpdump(1) utility now allow users to set a number on rules which will be exposed as part of the pflog header.

• OpenSSL has been updated to 1.1.1q.

• OpenSSH has been updated to 9.1p1.

• The LLVM toolchain suite has been updated to version 13.0.0.

• The dma(8) utility has been updated to snapshot 2022-01-27.

• The file(1) utility has been updated to version 5.43.

• The libarchive(3) library has been updated to version 3.6.0.

• And much more…​

For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list, available at:

For more information about FreeBSD release engineering activities, please see:

FreeBSD 12.4-RELEASE is now available for the amd64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpc64le, powerpcspe, armv6, armv7, aarch64, and riscv64 architectures.

FreeBSD 12.4-RELEASE can be installed from bootable ISO images or over the network. Some architectures also support installing from a USB memory stick. The required files can be downloaded as described in the section below.

SHA512 and SHA256 hashes for the release ISO, memory stick, and SD card images are included at the bottom of this message.

PGP-signed checksums for the release images are also available at:

A PGP-signed version of this announcement is available at:

The purpose of the images provided as part of the release are as follows:

dvd1

This contains everything necessary to install the base FreeBSD operating system, the documentation, debugging distribution sets, and a small set of pre-built packages aimed at getting a graphical workstation up and running. It also supports booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode. This should be all you need if you can burn and use DVD-sized media.

Additionally, this can be written to a USB memory stick (flash drive) for the amd64 architecture and used to do an install on machines capable of booting off USB drives. It also supports booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode.

As one example of how to use the memstick image, assuming the USB drive appears as /dev/da0 on your machine something like this should work:

# dd if=FreeBSD-12.4-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso \
    of=/dev/da0 bs=1m conv=sync

Be careful to make sure you get the target (of=) correct.

disc1

This contains the base FreeBSD operating system. It also supports booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode. There are no pre-built packages.

Additionally, this can be written to a USB memory stick (flash drive) for the amd64 architecture and used to do an install on machines capable of booting off USB drives. It also supports booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode. There are no pre-built packages.

As one example of how to use the memstick image, assuming the USB drive appears as /dev/da0 on your machine something like this should work:

# dd if=FreeBSD-12.4-RELEASE-amd64-disc1.iso \
    of=/dev/da0 bs=1m conv=sync

Be careful to make sure you get the target (of=) correct.

bootonly

This supports booting a machine using the CDROM drive but does not contain the installation distribution sets for installing FreeBSD from the CD itself. You would need to perform a network based install (e.g., from an HTTP or FTP server) after booting from the CD.

Additionally, this can be written to a USB memory stick (flash drive) for the amd64 architecture and used to do an install on machines capable of booting off USB drives. It also supports booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode. There are no pre-built packages.

As one example of how to use the memstick image, assuming the USB drive appears as /dev/da0 on your machine something like this should work:

# dd if=FreeBSD-12.4-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso \
    of=/dev/da0 bs=1m conv=sync

Be careful to make sure you get the target (of=) correct.

memstick

This can be written to a USB memory stick (flash drive) and used to do an install on machines capable of booting off USB drives. It also supports booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode. There are no pre-built packages.

As one example of how to use the memstick image, assuming the USB drive appears as /dev/da0 on your machine something like this should work:

# dd if=FreeBSD-12.4-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img \
    of=/dev/da0 bs=1m conv=sync

Be careful to make sure you get the target (of=) correct.

mini-memstick

This can be written to a USB memory stick (flash drive) and used to boot a machine, but does not contain the installation distribution sets on the medium itself, similar to the bootonly image. It also supports booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode. There are no pre-built packages.

As one example of how to use the mini-memstick image, assuming the USB drive appears as /dev/da0 on your machine something like this should work:

# dd if=FreeBSD-12.4-RELEASE-amd64-mini-memstick.img \
    of=/dev/da0 bs=1m conv=sync

Be careful to make sure you get the target (of=) correct.

FreeBSD/arm SD card images

These can be written to an SD card and used to boot the supported arm system. The SD card image contains the full FreeBSD installation, and can be installed onto SD cards as small as 512Mb.

For convenience for those without console access to the system, a freebsd user with a password of freebsd is available by default for ssh(1) access. Additionally, the root user password is set to root, which it is strongly recommended to change the password for both users after gaining access to the system.

To write the FreeBSD/arm image to an SD card, use the dd(1) utility, replacing KERNEL with the appropriate kernel configuration name for the system.

# dd if=FreeBSD-12.4-RELEASE-arm-armv6-KERNEL.img \
    of=/dev/da0 bs=1m conv=sync

Be careful to make sure you get the target (of=) correct.

FreeBSD 12.4-RELEASE can also be purchased on CD-ROM or DVD from several vendors. One of the vendors that will be offering FreeBSD 12.4-based products is:

Pre-installed virtual machine images are also available for the amd64 (x86_64), i386 (x86_32), AArch64 (arm64), and RISCV architectures in QCOW2, VHD, and VMDK disk image formats, as well as raw (unformatted) images.

FreeBSD 12.4-RELEASE amd64 is also available on these cloud hosting platforms:

  ap-south-2 region: ami-03fc41b5fddd1ccff
  ap-south-1 region: ami-05eb3a57f43de17e0
  eu-south-1 region: ami-0f653265a35acb8ee
  eu-south-2 region: ami-0283c9b53e77e2a43
  me-central-1 region: ami-036dafc92b8889806
  ca-central-1 region: ami-0971dee4589ea81c3
  eu-central-1 region: ami-049d0e2fadb9cf90c
  eu-central-2 region: ami-03a08cf3d56b5f872
  us-west-1 region: ami-05c8c7f5948bf5ebd
  us-west-2 region: ami-0178da7d9e8419972
  af-south-1 region: ami-0a3a6d3aaf1a400ef
  eu-north-1 region: ami-0c21c64bb9c85483c
  eu-west-3 region: ami-067b23779d7b7d470
  eu-west-2 region: ami-0d69e3c56dc906369
  eu-west-1 region: ami-02ae3649a01f1a281
  ap-northeast-3 region: ami-00beedfd652cf778c
  ap-northeast-2 region: ami-0d6e7097a9d9548a9
  me-south-1 region: ami-0cb41fb740d33e9e7
  ap-northeast-1 region: ami-03fe31854dc481b0e
  sa-east-1 region: ami-08dfa98e63ed1558c
  ap-east-1 region: ami-097b30a0d7afcf843
  ap-southeast-1 region: ami-025a6fff2784fd469
  ap-southeast-2 region: ami-051a3a08ac7cfcdb0
  ap-southeast-3 region: ami-0d5bfe6bc8c18b87c
  us-east-1 region: ami-0cb7a9df037ea045f
  us-east-2 region: ami-0bc1c6cab643df266

These AMI IDs can be retrieved from the Systems Manager Parameter Store in each region using the keys:

/aws/service/freebsd/amd64/base/ufs/12.4/RELEASE

FreeBSD/arm64 Amazon® EC2™:
AMIs are available in the following regions:

  ap-south-2 region: ami-00e27663b9d5ff4c0
  ap-south-1 region: ami-0ba040459a1007232
  eu-south-1 region: ami-0414b749e7067bcd6
  eu-south-2 region: ami-0f9fca3f3c2d49202
  me-central-1 region: ami-071ccc6b476b5b43c
  ca-central-1 region: ami-0eb6ec884ccca0cef
  eu-central-1 region: ami-00fd69bc016ca8690
  eu-central-2 region: ami-0f078197fbb7f49b5
  us-west-1 region: ami-088a995502466f767
  us-west-2 region: ami-01635212247505c83
  af-south-1 region: ami-031e626a6b2688135
  eu-north-1 region: ami-08124535227394d44
  eu-west-3 region: ami-0e660ef80701fb6ef
  eu-west-2 region: ami-03204a5225af5706c
  eu-west-1 region: ami-0a93f56ee30d1ce91
  ap-northeast-3 region: ami-01d57710338d2c9aa
  ap-northeast-2 region: ami-0ead6d7c05b8a2c65
  me-south-1 region: ami-095f1968c7739faf9
  ap-northeast-1 region: ami-0c485f0fac8cff81c
  sa-east-1 region: ami-052feaa53560e1483
  ap-east-1 region: ami-0f594db43f46b7a0c
  ap-southeast-1 region: ami-0526938480885586b
  ap-southeast-2 region: ami-018fe628087edf851
  ap-southeast-3 region: ami-0234fe8cc74c67008
  us-east-1 region: ami-0a44bc70b409ad654
  us-east-2 region: ami-0ac61c6fbc4638e2b

These AMI IDs can be retrieved from the Systems Manager Parameter Store in each region using the keys:

/aws/service/freebsd/arm64/base/ufs/12.4/RELEASE

      % gcloud compute instances create INSTANCE \
        --image freebsd-12-4-release-amd64 \
        --image-project=freebsd-org-cloud-dev
      % gcloud compute ssh INSTANCE

      % vagrant init freebsd/FreeBSD-12.4-RELEASE
      % vagrant up

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