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Project status

Last updated: August 2026.

This page exists so that nobody has to guess how far along the project is. It lists what has been done, what is being worked on, and what has explicitly not been tested.

Done

  • The build runs end to end from the project's own repositories on FreeBSD stable/15 and produces an installable ISO.
  • Installation works — verified by an automated acceptance run that installs in a virtual machine and checks the result through the API.
  • Upgrade from official TrueNAS CORE 13.3-U1.2 works and preserves pools, datasets, shares, users, passwords and iocage jails. See Upgrading.
  • Containers work. podman with ocijail runs FreeBSD images and, via FreeBSD's Linux emulation, Linux images too. That required fixing the kernel module list: linux64.ko shipped but could not load because its dependency mqueuefs was never built.
  • A configuration-loss bug was found and fixed. The stock installer copied the preserved configuration into /tmp, which is a 5 MB tmpfs, and copied a 24 MB package database and 93 MB of kernel modules into it before deleting them. The copy failed with No space left on device, and the failure was not checked — the upgrade continued and silently produced a system with a default configuration. The fix checks every copy and verifies the configuration database by checksum.
  • Upstream tracking is automated — four watchers, running weekly.
  • Legal cleanup — files covered by the TrueNAS Enterprise licence were removed at the outset; branding is the project's own.

In progress

  • Containers — podman and ocijail ship in the image and both FreeBSD and Linux containers run, verified on a freshly installed image. What is missing is integration: no web interface, no acceptance coverage.
  • First published release image.
  • An update train, so that upgrades do not require booting from media.

Not done, and honestly so

  • No release has been published yet. Everything is built from source.
  • One test machine. Every measurement on this site comes from the same virtual stand. No physical hardware, no varied disk controllers, no real workloads.
  • Untested configurations: HA (dual controller) systems, GELI encryption, iSCSI under load, Active Directory authentication, raidz pools, separate cache and log devices.
  • No upgrade path from anything older than 13.3.
  • No security audit. The project inherits whatever the upstream sources contain.

How claims here are made

Every statement on this site is either a measurement or is marked as untested. When something was verified, the project's journal records the command, the output and the date. When a previous claim turned out to be wrong — as happened with the reversibility of zpool upgrade — the correction is recorded next to the original rather than quietly replacing it.

That is deliberate. A fork that overstates what it has tested is worse than no fork at all, because people put data on it.