FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE Announced
FreeBSD 12.0 arrived on December 11, 2018, bringing UEFI+GELI installer support and a wave of toolchain updates.
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team announced FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE as available on December 11, 2018 — the first release from the stable/12 branch, and the branch that would go on to introduce bectl, the boot environment management tool referenced throughout this blog’s FreeBSD coverage.
Notable changes in this release
FreeBSD 12.0 updated OpenSSL to 1.1.1a (an LTS branch), Unbound to 1.8.1 with DANE-TA validation enabled by default, and OpenSSH to 7.8p1 — a substantial simultaneous refresh of the base system’s core cryptographic and networking components. The Clang/LLVM toolchain (LLVM, LLD, LLDB, compiler-rt, and libc++) was updated to version 6.0.1, keeping FreeBSD’s default compiler toolchain current with upstream LLVM development.
On the installer side, bsdinstall(8) gained support for UEFI combined with GELI full-disk encryption as a selectable installation option — letting a new installation boot via UEFI while still encrypting the root filesystem, a combination that previously required more manual post-install configuration.
Support window
FreeBSD 12.0’s release branch was planned for support through at least June 30, 2020, following FreeBSD’s standard practice of supporting each major branch for a fixed window after release, during which it receives security advisories and errata patches without requiring a full version upgrade.
Context within the release train
FreeBSD 12.0 sits between 11.x and 13.0 (April 2021) in the project’s release history — part of the same steady, multi-year release cadence that later delivered the ZFS-on-root default change in 13.0 and the toolchain refresh in 14.0, discussed elsewhere in this blog’s news coverage.
Sources: FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE Announcement — The FreeBSD Project, FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE Release Notes — The FreeBSD Project