r/freebsd

>… The project is only days old, according to its GitLab page, which shows it was created on June 23, 2026, and currently has no tagged releases. We will, for sure, watch closely to see how it unfolds over time.

megastallman@gmail.com / BSDun · GitLab

what’s gaming like? As that’s my main issue, also what’s the situation on nvidia drivers and general Linux software compatibility?

The thing is that I started with linux as a hobby during covid, and I have been using Void as my personal laptop OS almost one year. I recently realized that vultr provides freebsd and openbsd as OS. I am starting today, I want to learn jails and ZFS, and maybe one day migrate my cloud server from debian to freebsd.

Any suggestion for my journey?

Hello,

I've been trying to setup a handful of jails to get into freebsd for a student project.

Using VNET is rather straightforward, but I'm getting into an issue when I try to chain a few things together, and maybe I'm just taking it the wrong way.

For the project, I end up with the setup you can see on bsdrp, without the HA part, which isn't in the cards for now.

One of the issue here is having a private network for a specific environment. Because I could simply list a bunch of vnet interfaces into a single firewall/relayd jail but it also mean bringing down the jail if I want to add or remove a jail from private network and clean up. So I've been looking into using bridges for the private network.

It'd mean ending up with: bridge0 -> server firewall -> dedicated firewall -> dedicated bridge -> dedicated jails.

That way, we can just add on the bridge0 a new epair for a new dedicated environment, spin a dedicated bridge and firewall jail and we have done most of the work to setup some dedicated environment.

The goal is to get something like this:

          ┌─────────────┐                                                                              
          │host-level pf│                                                                              
          └──────┬──────┘                                                                              
                 │                                                                                     
                 │       ┌────xn1                                                                      
                 │       │                                                                             
                 ▼       │                                                                             
 wan──────────bridge0────┤                                                                             
                         │                                                                             
                         │               ┌────────────────────┐                            ┌─────────┐ 
                         ├──epairA───────┤private-env-level pf├───bridgeA──┬──epairAX──────┼webserver│ 
                         │               └────────────────────┘            │               └─────────┘ 
                         │                                                 │                           
                         │                                                 │               ┌─────────┐ 
                         │                                                 ├──epairAY──────┤database │ 
                         │                                                 │               └─────────┘ 
                         │                                                 │                           
                         │                                                 │               ┌─────────┐ 
                         │                                                 └──epairAZ──────┤   dns   │ 
                         │                                                                 └─────────┘ 
                         │                                                                             
                         │               ┌────────────────────┐                            ┌─────────┐ 
                         ├──epairB───────┤private-env-level pf├───bridgeB──┬──epairBX──────┼webserver│ 
                         │               └────────────────────┘            │               └─────────┘ 
                         │                                                 │                           
                         .                                                 │               ┌─────────┐ 
                         .                                                 ├──epairBY──────┤database │ 
                         .                                                 │               └─────────┘ 
                                                                           │                           
                                                                           │               ┌─────────┐ 
                                                                           └──epairBZ──────┤   dns   │ 
                                                                                           └─────────┘ 

My Questions:

Is it worth it to do it like this? I feel like scrapping the second bridge make managing new jails more painful. What setup would help if I want to redo this project later on?

I've an issue, my jails behind the second bridge can reach everybody within the private network.

I've set the gateway of the private jails to the IP the epair of the private-env-level pf has on the private bridge. When using netstat -r to check it out, it is extremely slowly writing out the proper routes, but it takes a long time, more than 30 seconds

# netstat -r
Routing tables

Internet:
Destination        Gateway            Flags         Netif Expire

I'm bad at networking, but IIRC the gateway should be the next jump in the network.

So for example: My firewall jail has 2 IPs:

• 10.10.10.10/24 as WAN.
• 172.16.1.1/27 as LAN.

My private jail should have the LAN as gateway, isn't it? Or I'm wrong and it explain the slowness of the netstat -r. I've looked into it a bit, and it seems removing the LRO option is important, I've checked and turned that off, but no improvement. Does anyone have pointers there?

Concerning the NATs Should I have a double NAT (private-env-level pf + host-level pf) ? The host-level pf one is fine, I've used it before and had no issue with it. The other one is a bit more out there for me: With a setup using bridge0 as public bridge. and bridge6 as private bridge. I've gathered that I should do this:

# Macros
ext_if  = "bridge0"
lan_if  = "bridge6"

nat on $lan_if from <jails> to any -> ($ext_if)

But it doesn't work. Anybody got input on that?

One of the goal here is to stick to plain jails, ifconfig and such, forcing myself to get low-level enough I've to learn the concepts. I've also excluded VLANs as of now (the multiple vlans on a single bridge in FreeBSD15 seems really nice), as it'd require changes to my hypervisor, which seems a bit finicky, mostly because its documentation doesn't cover my use case, and it is a student project with a deadline, so I've to stick to a rather simple setup. I'd be very happy to get back to the project once the deadline is past to start getting netgraph and akin in, but as of now, I'm trying to get something working for the deadline.

I'd be very glad for any kind of documentation that can walk me through that because as I pointed out, I'm not a network person, I'm kind of a dumbass when it comes to network.

Hey everyone. Today I use fedora linux,some times I’m looking to freeBSD,once I tried openBSD on a my second laptop and its was great,but idk what’s the situation with drivers. If you can help me understand issue,I would be grateful
I don’t play any games.
Usually I serf the net and sometimes write code on C/C++ and will write in NASM

Seeing that I am using an iMac Mid 2009 on Freebsd 14.4 I thought of everyone else using this similar computer hardware, ever since I've upgraded from 13.5, the screen freezes into black then recovers back so the time might be near.

I'm interested to know if anyone else runs similar hardware that's not unsupported anymore and whether how far are you into retiring it.

Are there any web office software projects that natively run on a *BSD server? I'm not talking about software that relies on Linux-based shims to run on any of the BSDs, I'm specifically talking about web office software that is either specifically written for the BSD ecosystem, or is at least has *BSD as a first tier platform.

hello, i am freebsd beginner and for wifi to work i added this to rc.conf

wlans_iwlwifi0="wlan0"

ifconfig_wlan0="WPA DHCP powersave"

wifi works now! but sometimes when i turn on my thinkpad wifi just doesnt work and i have to reboot or while im using wifi randomly stops working and i have to reboot.

can you help me? thx :)

From: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/15.1R/upgrading/

>FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE Upgrading Instructions

>[...]

>The procedure for binary upgrades depends on the method used to manage the operating system. To determine this, run the following command:

>pkg which /usr/bin/uname

>If /usr/bin/uname was not installed by a package is shown, see Upgrading with Distribution Sets below.

>If a package name is shown, such as FreeBSD-runtime-15.0, see Upgrading with Base System Packages below.

Ok, sounds good:

# pkg which /usr/bin/uname

/usr/bin/uname was not found in the database

Oh great, that's not one of the options. Is the page wrong and I'm scenario 1, or some unknown scenario 3?

Upgrading is already nerve wracking enough when I trust the docs...

EDIT: "Not installed" and "Not found in the database" seem like they might be very different things, but apparently they are not in this case. The upgrade succeeded successfully.

EDIT 2: Bug 296419 filed.

Many people use FreeBSD for Python development. How are y'all dealing with different Python versions, package management, environments, dependencies, reproducibility if you're doing something scientific, and so on?

These are perennial topics of discussion in Python communities, e.g.

• How do I better manage my python versions and packages?
• Properly Installing Python and Managing Packages
• A complete-ish guide to dependency management in Python
• Best practice for reproducible python environment?
• etc...

But I can't see much FreeBSD-specific discussion. Docker appears a lot in the above discussions, but is currently off the menu in FreeBSD. However, FreeBSD presents its own choices. How are you using jails, for example? And for Python packages, do you prefer to manage using pip or conda or FreeBSD's own pkg - at least for things available in the ports tree (and what do you do if they're not?). I also understand conda wants a full Linux environment, do FreeBSD users who prefer conda e.g. for scientific computing instead make do with https://www.freshports.org/sysutils/linux-miniconda-installer/ ?

I'm by no means an expert, just looking to get started with Python on FreeBSD, so a bit of ELI5 or step-by-step "how-to" would be welcome - but feel free to geek out.

One thing I've noticed is that the ports tree has both https://www.freshports.org/devel/uv/ and https://www.freshports.org/devel/py-uv/ as well as https://www.freshports.org/devel/py-poetry ... but I can't see pixi which (if I understand correctly) aims to play the same role with respect to conda as uv does to pip.

I have started using jails in my system but I am thinking if I am overdoing this. I had this mindset where I wanted my host to only contain packages that is minimal focusing on writing/reading with emacs and internet browsing; and then, I wanted other activities to be separated using jails. So, for example, I have a dedicated LAMP webdevelopment, one that has cybersec related packages, and then one that mainly hosts ollama. I like the idea that when I open my computer, there is no other services that will run besides from my emacsclient service. I can just use "service onestart jail-name" (I allow nopass in doas.conf so I can assign command aliases or functions) to start a specific service. I also like the idea of grouping and isolating the packages. For example, I feel peaceful that i dont have tmux in my main environment (my base, I feel like I use a lot of terms to mean the same thing) but I have it in my ollama jail because I will sometimes need multiple terminals there; or when I dont have mysql in my main but I have it in my LAMP jail.

I know of service jails but it means mixing my, for example, LAMP related pkgs to my emacs-and-internet-browsing related pkgs. So, I feel like I cannot move away from having thick jails. Is that true? I do mount my documents zfs dataset though; so the files created by me only appear in one place and they get mounted to the jails that need them.

Also am curious to see know other use cases of jails.

If you don’t mind me asking, I already know how to read the security advisories, errata, and open issues.

However, where exactly can I see what actually changed in 15.1-RELEASE-p1 or 15.0-RELEASE-p8? I’m not talking about vulnerabilities or bug lists, but exactly what went in.

PS: Google hasn’t been very helpful.