Offshoots of cancelled TrueNAS Core upgrade to FreeBSD 15
- ID
- 20686
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 02 Sep 2026, 9:49 PM
- Fetched
- 02 Sep 2026, 10:16 PM
- Provider
- The Register
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://www.theregister.com/storage/2026/09/02/offshoots-of-cancelled-truenas-core-upgrade-to-freebsd-15/5293725
- Source URL
- https://www.theregister.com/headlines.atom
Summary
- Score
- 5.0
- Created
- 02 Sep 2026, 10:19 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersdatabase_learnerssaas_founders
What happened
After iXsystems cancelled FreeBSD-based TrueNAS Core in 2024 in favor of Debian-based TrueNAS SCALE, two new community forks—FreeCORE and BSDnas—have emerged on FreeBSD 15. FreeCORE 15.0-U1 appeared August 27, 2026, and supports in-place upgrades from TrueNAS Core 13.3. An earlier fork, zVault, appears to have stalled.
Why it matters
If you run TrueNAS Core boxes and don't want to migrate to Linux-based SCALE—particularly because ZFS on Linux can't share ARC with the page cache, hurting memory-constrained servers—FreeCORE now offers a direct in-place upgrade path from 13.3 to FreeBSD 15. Decide now whether to jump to FreeCORE or commit to the SCALE migration, since staying on the old iXsystems train is no longer viable.
Discussion angle
For Malaysian startups self-hosting on limited-RAM NAS hardware, is the ZFS-on-FreeBSD ARC advantage worth betting on a community fork, or is migrating to TrueNAS SCALE on Linux the safer long-term play given broader Linux familiarity?