The FreeBSD Project has shipped the fifth alpha build for the upcoming 15.0-RELEASE, delivering a crucial fix for a power management regression. The update reverts a change that caused USB ports to be nonfunctional after a system resumed from S3 sleep. This release pushes the first beta back by one week, but the team remains focused on the target stable release announcement for December 2.
This alpha build enhances hardware support by updating the cxgbe(4) network driver for newer devices. The release engineering process also receives significant refinements. Developers now build release images in a “no-root” mode, and a pkgbase-repo.tar file containing the full pkgbase repository is now published for each architecture. These changes accompany numerous other bug fixes related to the build process.
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Installation, VM, and OCI container images are available for architectures including amd64, aarch64, powerpc64, and riscv64. For convenience, ARM SD card images ship with a default freebsd user, and it is strongly recommended that administrators change the default password. While Amazon EC2 AMI images were built for ALPHA5, they are not currently bootable due to a known issue.
Administrators can upgrade existing systems using freebsd-update. However, it is essential to first run freebsd-update fetch and freebsd-update install on the current system to patch a problem that would otherwise render a system inoperative when upgrading to 15.0. This release also bundles updates for expat, which moves to version 2.7.3, and includes several corrections for tzcode.
Get more information about FreeBSD 15.0-ALPHA5 from the freebsd-stable mailing list.
