Download FreeBSD 12.0

Members of the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team have released version 12 of FreeBSD. FreeBSD was created in 1993 and is developed as a whole, unlike, say, Linux, whose kernel is maintained by one group of developers and certain applications by others. Because of this, FreeBSD is generally considered more stable and robust than several other operating systems. Extensive release notes can be found on this page are found, these are briefly the most important changes:

FreeBSD 12.0 RELEASE Announcement
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE. This is the first release of the stable/12 branch.

Some of the highlights:

• OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.1.1a (LTS).
• Unbound has been updated to version 1.8.1, and DANE-TA has been enabled by default.
• OpenSSH has been updated to version 7.8p1.
• Additonal capsicum(4) support has been added to sshd(8).
• Clang, LLVM, LLD, LLDB, compiler-rt and libc++ has been updated to version 6.0.1.
• The vt(4) Terminus BSD Console font has been updated to version 4.46.
• The bsdinstall(8) utility now supports UEFI+GELI as an installation option.
• The VIMAGE kernel configuration option has been enabled by default.
• The NUMA option has been enabled by default in the amd64 GENERIC and MINIMAL kernel configurations.
• The netdump(4) driver has been added, providing a facility through which kernel crash dumps can be transmitted to a remote host after a system panic.
• The vt(4) driver has been updated with performance improvements, drawing text at rates ranging from 2- to 6-times faster.
• Various improvements to graphics support for current generation hardware.
• Support for capsicum(4) has been enabled on armv6 and armv7 by default.
• The UFS/FFS filesystem has been updated to consolidate TRIM/BIO_DELETE commands, reducing read/write requests due to fewer TRIM messages being sent simultaneously.
• The NFS version 4.1 server has been updated to include pNFS server support.
• The pf(4) packet filter is now usable within a jail(8) using vnet(9).
• The bhyve(8) utility has been updated to add NVMe device emulation.
• The bhyve(8) utility is now able to be run within a jail(8).
• Various Lua loader(8) improvements.
• KDE has been updated to version 5.12.5.
• And more…

For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list, available at:

For more information about FreeBSD release engineering activities, please see: