FreeBSD 15.0 Alpha 5 Brings Release Build Improvements

Written by Michael Larabel in BSD on 5 October 2025 at 08:18 PM EDT. 14 Comments

FreeBSD 15.0 continues working its way toward a stable release in early December and out today is the fifth alpha release.

FreeBSD 15.0 Alpha 5 was necessitated and thus pushing back the 15.0 release branching and first beta release by one week. But the hope is still for releasing on schedule with an announcement on 2 December if they are able to cut-out the FreeBSD 15.0-RC4 milestone.

With FreeBSD 15.0 Alpha 5 there are some release image/build improvements, new hardware support in the CXGBE network driver, a power management regression fix for after resuming from S3 sleep, and various other changes:

- Release images are now built in "no-root" mode.

- A "pkgbase-repo.tar" file is now published for each architecture containing the full pkgbase repository corresponding to the release.

- Many bug fixes related to pkgbase and the release build process.

- The cxgbe(4) driver has been updated to support newer hardware.

- Several issues in tzcode have been corrected.

- A change in power management which caused USB ports to be nonfunctional after resuming from S3 sleep has been reverted.

- expat has been updated to 2.7.3.

Downloads and more details on today's FreeBSD 15.0 Alpha 5 release via the freebsd-stable mailing list.

Fresh FreeBSD 15.0 comparison performance benchmarks coming up around the December release on Phoronix.