FreeBSD 12.0 Faces A Minor Setback But Still Should Be Out Ahead Of Christmas

The big FreeBSD 12.0 release still is expected to happen in December but will be a bit later than originally planned.

The FreeBSD release engineering team has decided that a fourth beta is warranted before branching the FreeBSD 12 code and moving onto the release candidate phase. There already has been a number of alpha releases and three betas, but due to a boot time issue and allowing more time for ARM/ARM64 builds to complete, a fourth beta has been penciled into the schedule.

That fourth beta is expected to happen by this weekend while the 12.0 branching is now set to happen at the end of next week along with FreeBSD 12.0-RC1. Three release candidates are likely coming on a weekly basis while the official FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE is now anticipated for 11 December, barring any other last minute delays. Even if being delayed a bit more to ensure a quality release, FreeBSD 12.0 still should make it out before Christmas.

Today's delay was announced on their mailing list and the updated release schedule can be found on FreeBSD.org.