FreeBSD 11.0 is Released, OpenSSH has been updated to 7.2p2


The FreeBSD project has announced a new stable release of the project's operating system. The new release, FreeBSD 11.0, drops support for the aging OpenSSH Protocol 1, adds wireless support for 802.11n, provides native graphics support for the operating system's bhyve hypervisor and an arm64 architecture port has been added. 

FreeBSD is an open source and server oriented operating system derived from BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution), the version of UNIX developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It offers advanced networking, performance, security and compatibility features today which are still missing in other operating systems, even some of the best commercial ones.

Distributed as installable or Live CDs for five architectures
The project is distributed as installable only CD ISO image that support the 32-bit/x86 compatible (including Pentium and Athlon), 64-bit/amd64 compatible (including Opteron, Athlon 64, and EM64T), IA-64 (ia64), PPC (PowerPC), and SPARC instruction set architectures.

It is also essential to mention that this operating system is not a Linux distribution, and it features several stable branches. While the 10.x branch delivers all the latest BSD technologies and it is considered the latest stable release, the 9.x and 8.x branches have been classified as legacy releases.


FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE Announcement

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE. This is the first release of the stable/11 branch.

Some of the highlights:

  • OpenSSH DSA key generation has been disabled by default. It is important to update OpenSSH keys prior to upgrading. Additionally, Protocol 1 support has been removed.
  • OpenSSH has been updated to 7.2p2.
  • Wireless support for 802.11n has been added.
  • By default, the ifconfig(8) utility will set the default regulatory domain to FCC on wireless interfaces. As a result, newly created wireless interfaces with default settings will have less chance to violate country-specific regulations.
  • The svnlite(1) utility has been updated to version 1.9.4.
  • The libblacklist(3) library and applications have been ported from the NetBSD Project.
  • Support for the AArch64 (arm64) architecture has been added.
  • Native graphics support has been added to the bhyve(8) hypervisor.
  • Broader wireless network driver support has been added.

For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list, available at:


For more information about FreeBSD release engineering activities, please see:


The release announcement has more information on upgrading older builds of FreeBSD or obtaining fresh installation media. Detailed changes available in 11.0 can be found in the release notes. Download: FreeBSD-11.0-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso (2,794MB, SHA256, signature).