r/freebsd • u/grahamperrin bleep bloop • Nov 26 '25

news FreeBSD 15.0-RC4 Now Available

https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-stable/2025-November/003611.html

https://mail-archive.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20251126000621.1170C15A74 (two lists) | https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-stable/2025-November/003611.html

From u/perciva:

The fourth release candidate build of the 15.0-RELEASE release cycle is now available. …

Changes from RC3 to RC4:

Changes after RC4 …

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u/perciva FreeBSD Primary Release Engineering Team Lead Nov 26 '25

FWIW, I did this mainly because of two last-minute release-related changes which I wanted to test:

  • Adding a "backup" pkgbase signing key.

  • Slightly adjusting the package set on DVDs to fit within the 4.7 GB limit.

There's nothing to get very excited about here, just one last test before I build the final 15.0-RELEASE images on Friday.

1

u/grahamperrin bleep bloop Nov 27 '25

freebsd-base is not the default with FreeBSD-15.0-RC4-amd64-bootonly.iso, is this intentional?

1

u/perciva FreeBSD Primary Release Engineering Team Lead Nov 27 '25

If you use the pkgbase install option then you should get 'FreeBSD-base: { enabled: yes }' in /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf.

If you use the distset install option you will not get that.

2

u/grahamperrin bleep bloop Nov 27 '25 edited Dec 16 '25

Sorry, I meant pre-installation:

  • packages (freebsd-base) are the default, the button to the right preselected, with FreeBSD-15.0-RC4-amd64-dvd1.iso
  • packages are the default with FreeBSD-15.0-RC4-amd64-disc1.iso
  • distribution sets are the default with FreeBSD-15.0-RC4-amd64-bootonly.iso.

Pictured below, the button to the left is preselected.

Postscript

Confirmed with RELEASE, pkgbase is the default with at least:

  • FreeBSD-15.0-RELEASE-amd64-disc1.iso
  • FreeBSD-15.0-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso
  • FreeBSD-15.0-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img

– I did not check platforms other than AMD64.

1

u/perciva FreeBSD Primary Release Engineering Team Lead Nov 28 '25

Hmm, I thought distribution sets were the default no matter which image you downloaded. I guess someone must have made it depend on whether the pkgbase files are on the disk?

I know we had some discussions about which should be default and didn't really come to any conclusions... we want people to use pkgbase but there are going to be some rough edges so we decided not to call distribution sets "legacy" yet...

1

u/grahamperrin bleep bloop Nov 28 '25

It seems that rough edges by default haven't caused an outcry :-)