On March 10, 2026, the FreeBSD project announced the release of a new stable version of the operating system – 14.4-RELEASE. This release, available on the official website, continues the development of the 14-STABLE branch and includes security fixes, component updates, new drivers, and improvements for cloud environments.
Changes in FreeBSD 14.4:
Security and Fixes:
Since the release of 14.3, a number of important security updates have been released. Among the fixed vulnerabilities:
- multiple vulnerabilities in OpenSSL (September 2025 and January 2026);
- remote code execution via ND6 Router Advertisements (December 2025);
- jail escape through nullfs and file descriptor exchange (January-February 2026);
- DoS in ipfw and caching issues in local-unbound.
User Space:
- diff now provides better I/O error reporting;
- sockstat displays UDP-Lite sockets;
- newfs received the -u flag to disable soft updates;
- new utility sndctl for managing sound devices with an interface similar to mixer;
- Jail: added meta and env options for storing arbitrary metadata and environment variables associated with each jail;
- privileges: the mdo utility (an alternative to sudo) has received extended options for fine control over the UID and GID of launched processes.
Third-party Software Updates:
- OpenZFS updated to version 2.2.9 with improvements in ARC and fixes for zpool add;
- OpenSSH updated to version 10.0p2: support for weak DSA has been removed, the default key exchange changed to the post-quantum algorithm mlkem768x25519-sha256;
- OpenSSL updated to version 3.0.16;
- xz (5.8.2), less (685), bc/dc (7.1.0), unbound (1.24.1), libarchive (3.8.5), bmake (20251111) and more;
- console font gallant now contains over 4300 glyphs, including Cyrillic, Greek, and Powerline symbols. The spleen font has been updated to version 2.2.0;
- the RIP routing protocol (utilities routed, route6d) has been deprecated and will be removed in future releases.
Kernel and Drivers.
- Jail: restrictions for unprivileged users in parent jails managing processes in child jails have been tightened. To maintain old behavior, the allow.nounprivileged_parent_tampering parameter has been introduced.
- Network: a /sbin/ipfw15 utility has been added for compatibility with 15.x kernels during upgrades. Compatibility code with IPFW versions prior to FreeBSD 8 has been removed.
- Drivers:
- ix/ixv: added support for the Intel Ethernet E610 family;
- iwlwifi: added ACPI support for managing 802.11ax/be performance;
- nvme: added support for BAR5 for compatibility with Google Compute Engine C4;
- repair: the ability to generate stable MAC addresses through sysctl has been added;
- qat: support for 402xx devices.
- Storage*:
- : support for the 9P file system (p9fs) has been added for use with bhyve and virtio-9p, allowing the guest system to access host files;
- bugs in tarfs when working with files larger than 4 GB and 8 GB have been fixed;
- checks in unionfs and nullfs have been tightened to prevent escaping from jail (chroot escape).
Bootloader and Installation
- Installation: bsdinstall no longer supports installing ZFS on MBR-partitioned disks (the option was non-functional);
- Booting: loader.efi now works correctly on older systems with UGA (e.g., MacBooks), using Blt functions only when GOP is available;
- Images: firmware for wireless adapters has been added to bootonly media, allowing the system to be installed via Wi-Fi;
- Raspberry Pi: the images for SD cards now include a device tree blob to support the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W.
Cloud Support
- nuageinit has received significant improvements: full compatibility with cloud-init has been added (support for runcmd, packages, write_files, etc.), network handling has been improved, and support for resolvconf has been added. This simplifies initialization of virtual machines in the clouds.
System Update
Upgrading to FreeBSD 14.4 is supported in two ways:
- Binary update using the freebsd-update utility (requires internet connection).
- Updating from source according to the instructions in the file /usr/src/UPDATING.
Source: linux.org.ru
