FreeBSD Lifecycle: End Of Life And Support Status
Last updated on January 13, 2025
FreeBSD is an operating system based on Unix. It is used in modern servers, desktops, and embedded platforms and is often preferred over Linux as it is more structured.
Support status guide
End of life (EOL) is the end of a product’s useful life. When a product reaches the end of its life cycle, the manufacturer no longer supports it. The following table explains the different phases of a product’s lifecycle. Testing status is when the product is initially released and EOL is when product support is no longer offered. The time between these two points is the support timeframe.
Testing
The software is not yet publicly available. It is in testing phase i.e., alpha, beta, release preview etc.
Active
The software is actively supported by the vendor.
Phasing Out
The software will soon reach its end of life. You need to look for upgrade or migration options. The software will automatically go into phasing out status 2 months before end of life.
End Of Life
The software is no longer supported by the vendor. You need to make sure your system and environment are safe.
Version
Released
Security Support
The naming convention of FreeBSD versions can be confusing. The stable releases have names like “stable/10“, and the corresponding builds have names like “FreeBSD 10.1-STABLE“.
Similarly, the releases from the security branch have names like “releng/10.0“, and the corresponding builds have names like “FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE -p4“.
There is no fixed tenure for the release of a new FreeBSD version. Each release is supported for a limited time by a security officer, whose job is to protect the FreeBSD community by keeping the community informed of bugs, exploits, popular attacks, and other risks.
Lately, all major versions of FreeBSD have been supported for precisely 5 years. However, the minor releases are supported for exactly 3 months after the release of the next minor release.
The FreeBSD Security Officer Charter issues security advisories to the stable and the security branches, but not the current branch since it is focused on the FreeBSD developer community.
EOLs