HEADS UP: FreeBSD main at 16

[Shawn Webb]

Hey all,

In preparation for the 15.0 release, FreeBSD has now created their
stable/15 branch and bumped the version number in the main branch to
16.

Our next quarterly build starts on 01 Oct 2025. I'm hoping to create
the hardened/15-stable/main branch prior to that. It's possible we may
have the build infrastructure ready in time for our first 15-STABLE
build, but I cannot guarantee that. If I'm unable to deploy a new
build server in time for the quarterly builds, I will perform a
one-off build when the infrastructure is ready.

I have yet to decide on a support timeline for our
hardened/14-stable/master branch. I suspect we will delegate support
for 14-STABLE to the wider community in the first quarter of 2026. We
don't really see many patches from the community, especially for
community-supported branches (like hardened/13-stable/master), so when
"community support" is mentioned, that usually means no support.

Once we produce our first 15-STABLE builds, I would highly encourage
users to start testing that out in their environments. There's a lot
of changes between 14-STABLE and 15-STABLE, especially with regards to
performance improvements.

I will keep everyone updated as to the creation of the
hardened/15-stable/main branch. Creating new stable branches is far
less time consuming than getting the infrastructure ready, so I should
have that done relatively soon.

Please let me know if you have any questions, comments, or concerns.

Thanks,

--
Shawn Webb
Cofounder / Security Engineer
HardenedBSD

Signal Username: shawn_webb.74
Tor-ified Signal: +1 303-901-1600 / shawn_webb_opsec.50
https://git.hardenedbsd.org/hardenedbsd/pubkeys/-/raw/master/Shawn_Webb/03A4CBEBB82EA5A67D9F3853FF2E67A277F8E1FA.pub.asc

[Shawn Webb]

I decided to create the hardened/15-stable/main branch on my lunch
break:
https://git.hardenedbsd.org/hardenedbsd/HardenedBSD/-/tree/hardened/15-stable/main?ref_type=heads

I'm hoping to work on the infrastructure side of things this weekend.

[Shawn Webb]

I've started the infrastructure work. We have an existing server that
might be a good candidate as a build server. I believe we will have a
build server deployed in time for the next quarterly build (01 Oct
2025).

[Shawn Webb]

Hey all,

I have the OS build VM (the VM that builds the installation media,
hbsd-update, and pkgbase artifacts) is set up, but has yet to complete
a build successfully.

I suspect the first quarterly builds for hardened/15-stable/main will
be delayed.

The package building VM has also been set up. I don't know how long
the package build will take, so this first package build might take
more time than desired. We'll have to see.

[Shawn Webb]

Our first production build of 15-stable has been released!
https://installers.hardenedbsd.org/pub/15-stable/amd64/amd64/installer/LATEST/

This particular build server needs some diagnostics. Accessing the
filesystem seems to be prohibitively slow for building 37,000+
packages. I'm currently unsure whether the problem is the
consumer-grade SSDs or the RAID controller. We use consumer SSDs
rather than enterprise since that's what we can afford.

So, it'll still be a bit before we have a matching 15-stable package
repo.