HardenedBSD January 2026 infrastructure and development updates

submited 03 February 2026

The January 2026 report highlights HardenedBSD's infrastructure improvements, including migrating package repositories to a local server with greater storage capacity and planning full automation of builds and syncing. Development efforts focused on merging commits from hardened/current to hardened/15-stable, addressing installer crashes in 15-STABLE, and experimenting with mesh networking tools like Meshtastic and Reticulum. Key changes in the source include disabling WITNESS vnode lock checks due to FreeBSD filesystem updates, opting ipfw into automatic variable initialization, and removing an outdated MAC hook for jail destruction. Port updates included bumping ftp/curl to 8.18.0, updating Reticulum, and enabling ZEROREG for OpenSSL 3, which may impact performance. The report also acknowledges ongoing work on filesystem-related kernel panics and community contributions.

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