The first release of the FreeCORE project has been published, which develops a distribution for rapid deployment of Network-Attached Storage (NAS) based on FreeBSD and OpenZFS technologies. FreeCORE is created as a fork of the codebase of the TrueNAS CORE distribution (a descendant of FreeNAS), which was transitioned to maintenance mode in 2024, focused on fixing bugs and security issues. The development of TrueNAS CORE was stopped by iXsystems in favor of the TrueNAS SCALE edition, which uses a Linux kernel and Debian package base.
Initially, the port was developed as an internal project for its clients who were not ready to transition their systems to the Linux-based TrueNAS SCALE distribution but wanted to receive updates with vulnerability fixes after the FreeBSD 13 branch maintenance was discontinued on April 30. Once the build was brought to the desired state, it was decided to publish the work as a separate open project.
The first release of FreeCORE 15.0-U1 is notable for the migration of the TrueNAS CORE 13.3 branch, built on FreeBSD 13, to the use of FreeBSD 15. Other changes include:
- Added the ability to use hardware tokens (WebAuthn) as a second factor for authentication in the web interface.
- Added support for one-time passwords (OTP) when connecting to the console.
- Included the drm-66-kmod driver for rendering through the GPU on the host and passing access to the GPU in jail environments.
- Added the rar2fs service for accessing rar archives as a read-only file system (allows providing network access to archives without unpacking them).
- The design of the web interface has been changed. The terminal with root rights has been separated into a distinct option, not included by default. Consoles for jail environments and of virtual machines, as well as system processes use the same terminal
Main changes, in addition to the update to FreeBSD 15, do not depend on shell access settings with root rights.
- Client and server OpenVPN have been replaced with WireGuard.
- Removed code for collecting and sending telemetry, such as crash reports and operational information in the distribution.
- Removed bindings to commercial plugins, such as tools for ensuring fault tolerance, KMIP, Fibre Channel port management, and integration with TrueCommand.
- Removed the MinIO server package and minio-client utility due to their discontinuation.
The size of the installation image is 1.3 GB. Updating existing TrueNAS CORE 13.3 installations to FreeCORE 15 is supported. AI tools were used during the porting process, but the changes made through AI were manually checked and tested on real hardware, and the author takes responsibility for the results.
Source: opennet.ru
