FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE Installation Instructions | The FreeBSD Project

Get FreeBSD Release Information Production Release: 15.0 Production Release: 14.3 Legacy Release: 13.5 Snapshot Releases Upcoming Release: 14.4 Upcoming Release: 15.1 Ported Applications FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE Installation Instructions Abstract This article gives some brief instructions on installing FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE and upgrading the systems running earlier releases. Table of Contents Installing FreeBSD Upgrading FreeBSD Installing FreeBSD The Installing FreeBSD chapter of the FreeBSD Handbook provides more in-depth information about the installation program itself, including a guided walk-through with screenshots. Upgrading FreeBSD If you are upgrading from a previous release of FreeBSD, please read the upgrading section in the Release Notes for notable incompatibilities carefully. Upgrading from Source The procedure for doing a source code based update is described in Updating FreeBSD from Source. For Git use the releng/14.3 branch which will be where any upcoming Security Advisories or Errata Notices will be applied. Upgrading Using "FreeBSD Update" The freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of amd64, arm64, and i386 systems running earlier FreeBSD releases. Systems running 13.5-RELEASE or 14.2-RELEASE can upgrade as follows: # freebsd-update fetch # freebsd-update install Now the freebsd-update(8) utility can fetch bits belonging to 14.3-RELEASE. During this process freebsd-update(8) will ask for help in merging configuration files. # freebsd-update upgrade -r 14.3-RELEASE # freebsd-update install The system must now be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before the non-kernel components are updated. # shutdown -r now After rebooting, freebsd-update(8) needs to be run again to install the new userland components: # freebsd-update install At this point, users of systems being upgraded from earlier FreeBSD releases will be prompted by freebsd-update(8) to rebuild or reinstall all third-party applications (e.g., ports installed from the ports tree or packages installed by pkg(8)) due to updates in system libraries. After updating installed third-party applications (and again, only if freebsd-update(8) printed a message indicating that this was necessary), run freebsd-update(8) again so that it can delete the old (no longer used) system libraries: # freebsd-update install Finally, reboot into a fully 14.3-RELEASE system: # shutdown -r now Last modified on: January 15, 2025 by Colin Percival