The first release of the FreeCORE project has been published. It focuses on developing a distribution for rapid deployment of network-attached storage (NAS) using FreeBSD and OpenZFS technologies. FreeCORE originated as a fork of the TrueNAS CORE distribution, which entered maintenance mode in 2024 for bug fixes and security updates. iXsystems discontinued TrueNAS CORE in favor of the TrueNAS SCALE edition, which utilizes the Linux kernel and Debian package base.
The initial development of FreeCORE started as an internal project to provide updates for customers who opted not to transition to the TrueNAS SCALE Linux distribution. This decision was made after the end of support for the FreeBSD 13 branch on April 30. Subsequently, the refined FreeCORE build was released as an open source project.
The first release of FreeCORE 15.0-U1 brought significant changes. It migrated the TrueNAS CORE 13.3 branch from FreeBSD 13 to FreeBSD 15. New features included:
- WebAuthn support for using hardware tokens as a second factor for web interface authentication.
- OTP support for connecting to the console.
- Inclusion of the drm-66-kmod driver for GPU rendering and access to GPU in jail environments.
- Introduction of rar2fs service for read-only access to rar archives over the network.
- Web interface design modifications, with root terminal access separated as an option.
- Replacement of OpenVPN with WireGuard for client and server components.
- Telemetry code for collecting and sending system information.
- Elimination of commercial add-on dependencies like fault tolerance tools, KMIP, Fiber Channel port management, and TrueCommand integration.
- Removal of MinIO server package and minio-client utility.
The installation image size is 1.3 GB and supports upgrades from existing TrueNAS CORE 13.3 installations to FreeCORE 15. The author of the project utilized AI tools for porting, with manual verification and testing on real hardware to