FreeBSD 15.0 has been released two years after the publication of branch 14.0. Installation builds have been prepared for various architectures including amd64, aarch64, armv7, powerpc64, powerpc64le, and riscv64. Additionally, assemblies are provided for virtualization systems (QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, raw) and cloud environments like Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, and Vagrant.
With the FreeBSD 15 branch, the maintenance period of significant branches has been reduced from 5 to 4 years. New significant branches will now be formed every two years. Interim releases (15.1, 15.2, 15.3) will be developed as part of a fixed development cycle, with new versions being published approximately every 6 months. This is a change from the previous annual release schedule. Intermediate releases will occur once every 3 months, except before the preparation of the first releases of new significant branches, where there will be a 6-month break in releases.
The main changes in FreeBSD 15.0 include the ability to use the pkg package manager to install and update components of the base system. pkgbase packages can be supplied on the installation media for offline installation or downloaded from the pkg.freebsd.org repository. The traditional method of updating the base system using freebsd-update utility is planned to be removed in the FreeBSD 16 branch, in favor of the new method which installs the base system as a set of packages from the FreeBSD-base repository.
- Added support for building FreeBSD in unprivileged environments that do not require root rights. This allows for the creation of installation ISO images and system images for virtual machines without needing root rights during the build stage.