FreeBSD offers many unique features.

No matter what the application, an operating system should take

advantage of every resource available. FreeBSD's focus on
performance, networking, and storage combines with ease of
system administration and comprehensive documentation to realize
the full potential of any computer.

A complete operating system based on 4.4BSD.

FreeBSD's distinguished roots derive from the BSD software
releases from the Computer Systems Research Group at the
University of California, Berkeley. Over twenty years of work have
been put into enhancing FreeBSD, adding industry-leading
scalability, network performance, management tools, file systems,
and security features. As a result, FreeBSD may be found across the
Internet, in the operating system of core router products, running
root name servers, hosting major web sites, and as the foundation
for widely used desktop operating systems. This is only possible
because of the diverse and worldwide membership of the volunteer
FreeBSD Project.
FreeBSD 10.X introduces many new features and replaces many
legacy tools with updated versions.
bhyve: A new BSD licensed, legacy-free hypervisor has been
imported to the FreeBSD base system. It is currently able to
run all supported versions of FreeBSD, and with the help of the
grub-bhyve port, OpenBSD and Linux.
KMS And New drm2 Video Drivers: The new drm2 driver
provides support for AMD GPUs up to the Radeon HD 6000
series and provides partial support for the Radeon HD 7000
family. FreeBSD now also supports Kernel Mode Setting for
AMD and Intel GPUs.
Capsicum Enabled By Default: Capsicum has been enabled
in the kernel by default, allowing sandboxing of several
programs that work within the "capabilities mode", such as:
o tcpdump
o dhclient

o hast
o rwhod
o kdump
New Binary Packaging System: FreeBSD now uses pkg, a
vastly improved package management system that supports
multiple repositories, signed packages, and safe upgrades. The
improved system is combined with more frequent official
package builds for all supported platforms and a new stable
branch of the ports tree for better long term support.
Unmapped I/O: The newly implemented concept of
unmapped VMIO buffers eliminates the need to perform costly
TLB shootdowns for buffer creation and reuse, reducing system
CPU time by up to 25-30% on large SMP machines under
heavy I/O load.
FreeBSD 9.X brought many new features and performance
enhancements with a special focus on desktop support and security.
OpenZFS: FreeBSD 9.2 includes OpenZFS v5000 (Feature
Flags), including the feature flags:
o async_destroy
o empty_bpobj
o lz4_compress
which allow ZFS destroy operations to happen in the
background, make snapshots consume less disk space, and
offers a better compression algorithm for compressed
datasets.
Capsicum Capability Mode: Capsicum is a set of features for
sandboxing support, using a capability model in which the
capabilities are file descriptors. Two new kernel options
CAPABILITIES and CAPABILITY_MODE have been added to the
GENERIC kernel.
Hhook: (Helper Hook) and khelp(9) (Kernel Helpers) KPIs
have been implemented. These are a superset of the pfil(9)
framework for more general use in the kernel. The hhook(9)
KPI provides a way for kernel subsystems to export hook
points that khelp(9) modules can hook to provide enhanced or

new functionality to the kernel. The khelp(9) KPI provides a

framework for managing khelp(9) modules, which indirectly
use the hhook(9) KPI to register their hook functions with hook
points of interest within the kernel. Together, they allow a
structured way to dynamically extend the kernel at runtime in
an ABI-preserving manner.
Accounting API has been implemented. It can keep perprocess, per-jail, and per-login class resource accounting
information. Note that this is neither built nor installed by
default. To build and install this, specify the option RACCT in
the kernel configuration file and rebuild the base system as
described in the FreeBSD Handbook.
Resource-limiting API has been implemented. It works in
conjunction with the RACCT resource accounting
implementation and takes user-configurable actions based on
the set of rules it maintains and the current resource usage.
The rctl(8) utility has been added to manage the rules in
userland. Note that this is neither built nor installed by default.
USB subsystem now supports USB packet filter. This allows
capturing packets which go through each USB host. The
architecture of the packet filter is similar to that of bpf. The
userland program usbdump(8) has been added.
Infiniband support: OFED (OpenFabrics Enterprise
Distribution) version 1.5.3 has been imported into the base
system.
TCP/IP network stack now supports the mod_cc(9)
pluggable congestion control framework. This allows TCP
congestion control algorithms to be implemented as
dynamically loadable kernel modules. Many kernel modules are
available: cc_chd(4) for the CAIA-Hamilton-Delay algorithm,
cc_cubic(4) for the CUBIC algorithm, cc_hd(4) for the
Hamilton-Delay algorithm, cc_htcp(4) for the H-TCP algorithm,
cc_newreno(4) for the NewReno algorithm, and cc_vegas(4)
for the Vegas algorithm. The default algorithm can be set by a
new sysctl(8) variable net.inet.tcp.cc.algorithm.
SU+J: FreeBSD's Fast File System now supports soft updates
with journaling. It introduces an intent log into a softupdates-

enabled file system which eliminates the need for background

fsck(8) even on unclean shutdowns.
FreeBSD includes a number of other great features:
Firewalls: The base system includes IPFW and IPFilter, as well
as a modified version of the popular pf with improved SMP
performance. IPFW also includes the dummynet feature,
allowing network administrators to simulate adverse network
conditions, including latency, jitter, packet loss and limited
bandwidth.
Jails are a light-weight alternative to virtualization. Allowing
processes to be restricted to a namespace with access only to
the file systems and network addresses assigned to that
namespace. Jails are also Hierarchical, allowing jails-withinjails.
Linux emulation provides a system call translation layer that
allows unmodified Linux binaries to be run on FreeBSD
systems.
DTrace provides a comprehensive framework for tracing and
troubleshooting kernel and application performance issues
while under live load.
The Ports Collection is a set of more than 23,000 third party
applications that can be easily installed and run on FreeBSD.
The ports architecture also allows for easy customization of the
compile time options of many of the applications.
Network Virtualization: A container ("vimage") has been
implemented, extending the FreeBSD kernel to maintain
multiple independent instances of networking state. Vimage
facilities can be used independently to create fully virtualized
network topologies, and jail(8) can directly take advantage of
a fully virtualized network stack.