FreeBSD 11.0 Release Process
Introduction
This is the release schedule for FreeBSD 11.0. For more information about the release engineering process, please see the Release Engineering section of the web site.
General discussions about the pending release and known issues should be sent to the public freebsd-current mailing list. MFC requests should be sent to re@FreeBSD.org.
Help With The Next FreeBSD Release
Our developers and release engineers are working on the next release of FreeBSD; if you wish to help with testing, please download the latest build. Please note that these images are, by their very nature, intended for testing and should not be used in production environments.
Available installation images are listed on the download page.
Schedule
During the head freeze, the Release Engineering Team may create ALPHA snapshots to publish for testing purposes. As the frequency and total number of the ALPHA snapshots will depend on the length of time the head branch is frozen, no official schedule is provided.
Announcements regarding the availability of the ALPHA snapshots will be sent to the freebsd-current and freebsd-snapshots mailing lists.
| Action | Expected | Actual | Description |
| Initial release schedule announcement | - | 26 February 2015 | Release Engineers send announcement email to developers with a rough schedule. |
| Release schedule reminder | 25 March 2016 | 13 April 2016 | Release Engineers send reminder announcement e-mail to developers with updated schedule. |
| Code slush begins | 27 May 2016 | 27 May 2016 | Release Engineers announce that all further commits to the head branch will not require explicit approval, however new features should be avoided. |
| Code freeze begins | 10 June 2016 | 10 June 2016 | Release Engineers announce that all further commits to the head branch will require explicit approval. Certain blanket approvals will be granted for narrow areas of development, documentation improvements, etc. |
| KBI freeze begins | 24 June 2016 | 24 June 2016 | Release Engineers announce that all further commits to the head branch will require explicit approval. Additionally, there can be no changes to the KBI until head is branched to stable/11. |
| stable/11 branch | 8 July 2016 | 8 July 2016 | Subversion branch created; release engineering continues on this branch. |
| BETA1 builds begin | 8 July 2016 | 8 July 2016 | First beta test snapshot. |
| head thaw | 9 July 2016 | 9 July 2016 | The code freeze on the head branch is lifted. |
| BETA2 builds begin | 15 July 2016 | 22 July 2016 | Second beta test snapshot. |
| BETA3 builds begin | 29 July 2016 | 29 July 2016 | Third beta test snapshot. |
| BETA4 builds begin | 5 August 2016 | 5 August 2016 | Fourth beta test snapshot. |
| releng/11.0 branch | 12 August 2016 | 12 August 2016 | Subversion branch created; future release engineering proceeds on this branch. |
| RC1 builds begin | 12 August 2016 | 12 August 2016 | First release candidate. |
| stable/11 thaw | 13 August 2016 | 12 August 2016 | The code freeze on the stable/11 branch is lifted. |
| RC2 builds begin | 19 August 2016 | 24 August 2016 | Second release candidate. |
| RC3 builds begin | 14 September 2016 |
14 September 2016 | Third release candidate. |
| RELEASE builds begin | 21 September 2016 |
28 September 2016 |
11.0-RELEASE builds begin. |
| RELEASE announcement | 10 October 2016 |
10 October 2016 | 11.0-RELEASE press release. |
| Turn over to the secteam | - | 24 October 2016 | releng/11.0 branch is handed over to the FreeBSD Security Officer Team in one or two weeks after the announcement. |
"*" indicates "as-needed" items.