
The first BETA build of the 12.3-RELEASE release cycle is now available.
Installation images are available for:
o 12.3-BETA1 amd64 GENERIC
o 12.3-BETA1 i386 GENERIC
o 12.3-BETA1 powerpc GENERIC
o 12.3-BETA1 powerpc64 GENERIC64
o 12.3-BETA1 powerpcspe MPC85XXSPE
o 12.3-BETA1 sparc64 GENERIC
o 12.3-BETA1 armv6 RPI-B
o 12.3-BETA1 armv7 BANANAPI
o 12.3-BETA1 armv7 BEAGLEBONE
o 12.3-BETA1 armv7 CUBIEBOARD
o 12.3-BETA1 armv7 CUBIEBOARD2
o 12.3-BETA1 armv7 CUBOX-HUMMINGBOARD
o 12.3-BETA1 armv7 RPI2
o 12.3-BETA1 armv7 WANDBOARD
o 12.3-BETA1 armv7 GENERICSD
o 12.3-BETA1 aarch64 GENERIC
o 12.3-BETA1 aarch64 RPI3
o 12.3-BETA1 aarch64 PINE64
o 12.3-BETA1 aarch64 PINE64-LTS
Note regarding arm SD card images: For convenience for those without
console access to the system, a freebsd user with a password of
freebsd is available by default for ssh(1) access. Additionally,
the root user password is set to root. It is strongly recommended
to change the password for both users after gaining access to the
system.
Installer images and memory stick images are available here:
https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/ISO-IMAGES/12.3/
The image checksums follow at the end of this e-mail.
If you notice problems you can report them through the Bugzilla PR
system or on the -stable mailing list.
If you would like to use SVN to do a source based update of an existing
system, use the "releng/12.3" branch.
Please note, the release notes page is not yet complete, and will be
updated on an ongoing basis as the 12.3-RELEASE cycle progresses.
=== Virtual Machine Disk Images ===
VM disk images are available for the amd64, i386, and aarch64
architectures. Disk images may be downloaded from the following URL
(or any of the FreeBSD download mirrors):
https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/VM-IMAGES/12.3-BETA1/
The partition layout is:
~ 16 kB - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label)
~ 1 GB - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label)
~ 20 GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)
The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image
formats. The image download size is approximately 135 MB and 165 MB
respectively (amd64/i386), decompressing to a 21 GB sparse image.
Note regarding arm64/aarch64 virtual machine images: a modified QEMU EFI
loader file is needed for qemu-system-aarch64 to be able to boot the
virtual machine images. See this page for more information:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64/QEMU
To boot the VM image, run:
% qemu-system-aarch64 -m 4096M -cpu cortex-a57 -M virt \
-bios QEMU_EFI.fd -serial telnet::4444,server -nographic \
-drive if=none,file=VMDISK,id=hd0 \
-device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 \
-device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0 \
-netdev user,id=net0
Be sure to replace "VMDISK" with the path to the virtual machine image.

FreeBSD 12.3 Prepares For New Release Ahead Of Christmas, Beta
FreeBSD 12.3 Prepares For New Release Ahead Of Christmas, Beta Starts