FreeBSD's code base has undergone over thirty years of continuous development, improvement, and optimization. It is developed and maintained by a large team of individuals. FreeBSD provides advanced networking, impressive security features, and world class performance and is used by some of the world's busiest web sites and most pervasive embedded networking and storage devices.
Cutting edge features
FreeBSD offers advanced networking, performance, security and compatibility features today which are still missing in other operating systems, even some of the best commercial ones.
Powerful Internet solutions
FreeBSD makes an ideal Internet or Intranet server. It provides robust network services under the heaviest loads and uses memory efficiently to maintain good response times for thousands of simultaneous user processes.
Advanced Embedded Platform
FreeBSD brings advanced network operating system features to appliance and embedded platforms, from higher-end Intel-based appliances to Arm, PowerPC, and shortly MIPS hardware platforms. From mail and web appliances to routers, time servers, and wireless access points, vendors around the world rely on FreeBSD's integrated build and cross-build environments and advanced features as the foundation for their embedded products. And the Berkeley open source license lets them decide how many of their local changes they want to contribute back.
Run a huge number of applications
With over 20,000 ported libraries and applications, FreeBSD supports applications for desktop, server, appliance, and embedded environments.
Easy to install
FreeBSD can be installed from a variety of media including CD-ROM, DVD, or directly over the network using FTP or NFS. All you need are these directions.
FreeBSD is free
While you might expect an operating system with these features to sell for a high price, FreeBSD is available free of charge and comes with full source code. If you would like to purchase or download a copy to try out, more information is available.
What's New
The release notes for FreeBSD 13.3-RELEASE contain a summary of the changes made to the FreeBSD base system on the 13-STABLE development line. This document lists applicable security advisories that were issued since the last release, as well as significant changes to the FreeBSD kernel and userland. Some brief remarks on upgrading are also presented.
Introduction
This document contains the release notes for FreeBSD 13.3-RELEASE. It describes recently added, changed, or deleted features of FreeBSD. It also provides some notes on upgrading from previous versions of FreeBSD.
The release distribution to which these release notes apply represents the latest point along the 13-STABLE development branch since 13-STABLE was created. Information regarding pre-built, binary release distributions along this branch can be found here.
The release distribution to which these release notes apply represents a point along the 13-STABLE development branch between 13.2-RELEASE and the future 13.4-RELEASE.
This distribution of FreeBSD 13.3-RELEASE is a release distribution. It can be found at https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/ or any of its mirrors. More information on obtaining this (or other) release distributions of FreeBSD can be found in the Obtaining FreeBSD appendix to the FreeBSD Handbook.
All users are encouraged to consult the release errata before installing FreeBSD. The errata document is updated with "late-breaking" information discovered late in the release cycle or after the release. Typically, it contains information on known bugs, security advisories, and corrections to documentation. An up-to-date copy of the errata for FreeBSD 13.3-RELEASE can be found on the FreeBSD Web site.
This document describes the most user-visible new or changed features in FreeBSD 13-STABLE since 13.2-RELEASE. Note that some of the changes described here are also available in FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE.
Typical release note items document recent security advisories issued after 13.2-RELEASE, new drivers or hardware support, new commands or options, major bug fixes, or contributed software upgrades. They may also list changes to major ports/packages or release engineering practices. Clearly the release notes cannot list every single change made to FreeBSD between releases; this document focuses primarily on security advisories, user-visible changes, and major architectural improvements.
Upgrading from Previous Releases of FreeBSD
Binary upgrades between RELEASE versions (and snapshots of the various security branches) are supported using the freebsd-update(8) utility. See the release-specific upgrade procedure, FreeBSD 13.3-RELEASE upgrade information, with more details in the FreeBSD handbook binary upgrade procedure. This will update unmodified userland utilities, as well as unmodified GENERIC kernels distributed as a part of an official FreeBSD release. The freebsd-update(8) utility requires that the host being upgraded have Internet connectivity.
Source-based upgrades (those based on recompiling the FreeBSD base system from source code) from previous versions are supported, according to the instructions in /usr/src/UPDATING.