Questions about the future of FreeBSD images

Incus
1

Hi all,

I am maintaining the FreeBSD images for Incus, but am not enough of a FreeBSD regular to know the usual dos and don’ts of the ecosystem. With the FreeBSD 15.1 release comes the question of what we should do with our FreeBSD 15.0 images. Every project downstream of FreeBSD that I’ve seen in the wild refers to it by its minor version (which is not that common in Linux distributions like Debian, of which I’m quite a bit more familiar).

Does it make sense to rename 14.X images 14 and 15.X images 15, and always bump to the latest minor? Does it rather make sense to keep support for a few minors and keep referring to them by their full name (minus the -RELEASE)? I’d be glad if FreeBSD users, and why not developers, could chime in to bring in their perspective.

Thanks :slight_smile:

2

Where are the FreeBSD images? I would love to test / install them.

Freebsd usually does a Major.Minor-RELEASE-pPATCHNO pattern.

Their release page contains the last two 14.x and the current two 15.x everything else is in the archives.

3 
stgraber@vorash-d13:~$ incus image list images: os=Freebsd architecture=amd64 -fcompact | grep freebsd/
 freebsd/14.4/amd64 (3 more)        6fb000af4879  yes     Freebsd 14.4 amd64 (20260719_11:02)  x86_64        VIRTUAL-MACHINE  2662.69MiB  2026/07/18 20:00 EDT 
 freebsd/14.4/cloud+ufs/amd64       5ae7722e3975  yes     Freebsd 14.4 amd64 (20260719_11:32)  x86_64        VIRTUAL-MACHINE  2529.25MiB  2026/07/18 20:00 EDT 
 freebsd/14.4/cloud/amd64 (1 more)  625b73a51616  yes     Freebsd 14.4 amd64 (20260718_10:35)  x86_64        VIRTUAL-MACHINE  2754.44MiB  2026/07/17 20:00 EDT 
 freebsd/14.4/ufs/amd64 (1 more)    a9cbfa401da2  yes     Freebsd 14.4 amd64 (20260719_12:09)  x86_64        VIRTUAL-MACHINE  2437.19MiB  2026/07/18 20:00 EDT 
 freebsd/15.0/amd64 (3 more)        20488aeb93b3  yes     Freebsd 15.0 amd64 (20260718_11:04)  x86_64        VIRTUAL-MACHINE  2734.19MiB  2026/07/17 20:00 EDT 
 freebsd/15.0/cloud+ufs/amd64       aa4679e1a672  yes     Freebsd 15.0 amd64 (20260719_11:02)  x86_64        VIRTUAL-MACHINE  2506.94MiB  2026/07/18 20:00 EDT 
 freebsd/15.0/cloud/amd64 (1 more)  dc11350fac0a  yes     Freebsd 15.0 amd64 (20260718_10:35)  x86_64        VIRTUAL-MACHINE  2733.56MiB  2026/07/17 20:00 EDT 
 freebsd/15.0/ufs/amd64 (1 more)    5c6532993355  yes     Freebsd 15.0 amd64 (20260719_11:32)  x86_64        VIRTUAL-MACHINE  2506.81MiB  2026/07/18 20:00 EDT

@bensmrs I guess we could match the “last two minor of any supported major” pattern if that’s what FreeBSD upstream does.

1 Like