FreeBSD 13.0 Makes ZFS the Installer's Default Root Filesystem
FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE, published April 13, 2021, made ZFS-on-root the bsdinstall default — a significant shift for how new FreeBSD systems get set up.
FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE was published on April 13, 2021. Alongside the usual toolchain and driver updates, it marked a meaningful default-behavior change: installing FreeBSD 13.0 or later with the default bsdinstall options now sets up ZFS as the root filesystem rather than UFS.
Why this default change mattered
Before FreeBSD 13, UFS had long been the installer’s default, with ZFS available as an explicit, more advanced option during setup. Making ZFS the default meant new FreeBSD installations gained boot environments, transparent compression, and copy-on-write snapshots out of the box — capabilities covered in more depth elsewhere on this blog — without a user needing to know to opt into ZFS specifically during install.
Boot environments become a first-class workflow
Paired with this default change, bectl — the boot environment management utility that had been introduced with FreeBSD 12.0 — became a far more commonly used tool, since a ZFS-on-root default install is what actually makes boot environments practical for typical users: snapshotting the current root before a risky upgrade, and being able to select and boot the previous environment directly from the loader if something goes wrong.
The broader trend this reflects
This default change reflected ZFS’s maturing status within FreeBSD more broadly, after years of upstream OpenZFS integration work following Sun’s original release of ZFS and its subsequent adoption across the BSD and Linux ecosystems via the OpenZFS project. FreeBSD 13.0 was, in effect, the release where the project decided ZFS was ready to be everyone’s default, not just an advanced user’s choice.
Sources: FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE Release Notes — The FreeBSD Project, Upgrade FreeBSD with ZFS Boot Environments — vermaden