FreeBSD 15 trims legacy fat and revamps how OS is built

The latest release of FreeBSD contains a lot of crucial under-the-hood changes – and drops 32-bit support on both x86 and POWER, although ARM-v7 survives.

FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE arrived this week, the latest release of the Unix world's leading alternative to Linux. As well as numerous bug fixes and upgrades to many of its components, the major changes in this version are reductions in the number of platforms the OS supports, and in how it's built and how its component software is packaged.

FreeBSD 15 has significantly reduced support for 32-bit platforms. Compared to FreeBSD 14 in 2023, there are no longer builds for x86-32, POWER, or ARM-v6. As the release notes put it:

The venerable 32-bit hardware platforms i386, armv6, and 32-bit powerpc have been retired. 32-bit application support lives on via the 32-bit compatibility mode in their respective 64-bit platforms. The armv7 platform remains as the last ...