FreeBSD Re-Introduces WireGuard Support Into Its Kernel

Back in late 2020 FreeBSD initially landed WireGuard support ahead of FreeBSD 13. But then during the FreeBSD 13 release candidate phase, the WireGuard driver was removed over concerns over the quality of the initial implementation.

As of Friday, a new WireGuard driver implementation has been re-introduced with many fixes/improvements over the code state from 2020.

This new WireGuard driver for FreeBSD was worked on in cooperation with the upstream WireGuard developers led by Jason Donenfeld. This is similar to the WireGuard Linux kernel driver that has existed for a while now with the kernel-based implementations for this open-source secure VPN tunnel being much faster than pure user-space based alternative implementations.

With this merge, the 7.6k WireGuard kernel driver is now in mainline FreeBSD for what will be included with FreeBSD 14. For those on existing FreeBSD releases, the WireGuard module is also available via FreeBSD ports.