FreeBSD Officially Supported in OCI Runtime Specification v1.3

3 hours ago 1

November 4, 2025

FreeBSD has been included as an officially supported platform in version 1.3 of the Open Container Initiative (OCI) runtime specification, released November 4, 2025. This milestone marks a significant achievement for FreeBSD and represents years of dedicated work by volunteers in the community to bring cloud-native container technology to the platform.

A Major Step Forward for FreeBSD

This inclusion in the OCI runtime spec represents a watershed moment for FreeBSD, solidifying its position as a first-class platform for modern cloud-native workloads. Official OCI support means that FreeBSD users can now leverage the full ecosystem of container tools and orchestration platforms with confidence, knowing they’re working with a standardized, vendor-neutral specification. For organizations already running FreeBSD in production, this opens doors to containerized application deployment strategies that align with industry standards, making FreeBSD an even more compelling choice for cloud infrastructure, edge computing, and enterprise deployments.

Building on FreeBSD’s Virtualization Heritage

The addition of cloud-native container support complements FreeBSD’s already robust virtualization capabilities, particularly the powerful FreeBSD jails technology that has been a cornerstone of the operating system for over two decades. In fact, OCI containers on FreeBSD are implemented using jails as the underlying isolation mechanism, bringing together the security and resource management benefits of jails with the portability and ecosystem advantages of OCI-compliant containers. This marriage of technologies gives FreeBSD users the best of both worlds: the lightweight, secure isolation that jails are known for, combined with the standardized tooling and image formats that have made containers ubiquitous in modern software development.

A Community Effort Years in the Making

This achievement is the culmination of extensive development work led by volunteer Doug Rabson, with support and collaboration from numerous contributors across the OCI community, the FreeBSD Project, and the FreeBSD Foundation. The path to official OCI support has been marked by several key milestones:

2021: Samuel Karp released runj, the first OCI runtime for FreeBSD, with support for containerd, demonstrating the viability of running OCI containers on the platform.
2022: Doug Rabson added FreeBSD support to Buildah and Podman, two critical container management tools. This work required key changes to the FreeBSD kernel to meet the requirements of the OCI runtime specification, effectively paving the way for today’s official recognition.
2024: Dave Cottlehuber led the work to include FreeBSD official OCI images, which first appeared in 14.2. They are available on Docker Hub and GitHub Container Registry.
2025: Doug Rabson led the work to add FreeBSD as a platform to the OCI runtime specification, it is available in v1.3.

The FreeBSD Foundation would like to take this opportunity to recognize the tireless efforts of Samuel Karp and Doug Rabson in driving this initiative forward, as well as to all the contributors who have helped make FreeBSD a fully-supported OCI platform.

Looking Ahead

With official OCI runtime spec support now in place, FreeBSD is better positioned than ever to serve the needs of modern infrastructure and application development. We look forward to seeing how the community leverages this capability to build innovative solutions on FreeBSD.

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