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BSDnas

A community fork that continues TrueNAS CORE on current FreeBSD.

TrueNAS CORE stopped at 13.3, on FreeBSD 13.3 — a release that has since been removed from the FreeBSD mirrors. BSDnas moves that system onto FreeBSD stable/15 and keeps it there: new FreeBSD releases, security advisories and OpenZFS versions are tracked continuously rather than in one heroic jump every few years.

Read this before you install anything

This is an early project. One person maintains it. Everything described here has been measured on a test machine, and nothing has been measured anywhere else. Do not put your only copy of anything on it.

What actually works

Verified on a test stand, not claimed from theory:
Builds reproducibly from source yes, on FreeBSD stable/15
Installs from ISO yes
Upgrades an existing TrueNAS CORE 13.3 install yes, config preserved
Pools created by OpenZFS 2.2 import and work on 2.4.3
SMB shares, users, passwords from 13.3 preserved
iocage jails with 13.3 userland run on the FreeBSD 15 kernel

A single upgrade run moves the system from FreeBSD 13.3 to stable/15, OpenZFS 2.2 to 2.4.3, Samba 4.20 to 4.23, and the ports Python from 3.9 to 3.11. On the test stand it takes about fifteen minutes.

See Upgrading for the procedure and the caveats — particularly the one about zpool upgrade, which is worth reading before you run it.

What does not work yet

Honesty is cheaper than support tickets:

  • No public release image yet. Build it yourself — see Building from source.
  • The SSH service does not start by itself after an upgrade; enable it again.
  • The iocage plugin index is no longer maintained upstream, so plugins must come from your own index or be installed by hand.
  • Hardware RAID utilities (arcconf, megacli, tw_cli) are not included: their vendors withdrew the distribution files. On a ZFS system hardware RAID is inadvisable anyway.
  • VMware and Xen guest additions are currently absent — those ports do not compile on FreeBSD 15 with the current compiler.
  • Container support is in progress.

Why this exists

A fork rots when nobody moves it forward. The gap between TrueNAS CORE 13.3 and current FreeBSD did not open because of any hard technical problem — it opened because for a year nobody rebased the patches.

So the project is built around that failure mode. The FreeBSD patch set is carried as a rebased series rather than a merge history, an upstream watcher reports every week what has moved (FreeBSD base, security advisories, the quarterly ports branch, OpenZFS), and every claim on this site comes with the measurement behind it.

Not affiliated with iXsystems

BSDnas is an independent fork. It is not produced, endorsed or supported by iXsystems, Inc. TrueNAS is their trademark. The middleware this project builds on is LGPL-3.0; files covered by the TrueNAS Enterprise licence were removed from the fork at the outset.