For those on the current FreeBSD 14 series with no immediate plans to move to FreeBSD 15 that debuted at the end of 2025, FreeBSD developers have been preparing for the release of FreeBSD 14.4. Released overnight was the first release candidate of FreeBSD 14.4.
FreeBSD 14.4 is bringing various backports and fixes to the FreeBSD 14 series for those still planning to use this release branch for a while. FreeBSD 14.4 is bringing a number of application updates, like minor updates to OpenSSL and OpenZFS and XZ. Plus new hardware support coming thanks to various device driver changes such as for supporting the Fujitsu RAID Controller SAS D3116 controllers, NVMe support on Google Compute C4 machines, Intel Ethernet E610 NIC support, and ACPI support for the Intel IWLWIFI driver.
FreeBSD 14.4 also adds the 9P file-system support for use with Bhyve VirtIO-9P devices as a nice virtualization enhancement. There is also a fix to prevent hangs on AMD systems with recent Microsoft Windows guests when using the Bhyve hypervisor. More details on these changes coming with FreeBSD 14.4 can be found via the work-in-progress release notes.
Specific to the new FreeBSD 14.4-RC1 test release compared to the earlier betas is now adding more packages to the DVD image, such as Emacs, Vim, and various FUSE packages for EXT2 and NTFS file-systems. Plus a deadlock fix in NULLFS, a buffer overflow in RTSOCK, the installer properly handling EFI boot entries, and other fixes. FreeBSD 14.4-RC1 for testing can be downloaded and more information from the release announcement.
