FreeCORE 15.1-RC4

NVMe disks and virtio-9p shared directories for virtual machines, the Bastille CLI flow across upgrades, and the fixes of 15.0-U1.7 in the fourth 15.1 release candidate.

FreeCORE 15.1-RC4 is the fourth release candidate on the 15.1 line. It adds NVMe disks and shared directories for virtual machines, makes the Bastille CLI flow hold across upgrades, and lets the host's podman see the Applications store. It includes the fixes in 15.0-U1.7 and everything in 15.1-RC3.

Release date: 17 September 2026

RC4 is for evaluation, not production. Test it on a system you can restore or reinstall. The published CORE compatibility results do not establish that every catalog application or migrated workload works correctly.

Virtual Machines

• A disk or raw file can be attached in NVMe mode beside AHCI and VirtIO, and a host directory can be shared into a guest as a Shared Directory (virtio-9p) device. The NVMe emulation is given the disk's sector size. The guest needs its own driver for either: FreeBSD and Linux guests carry both.

Bastille

• A VNET jail created with the CLI ran with an undefined devfs ruleset and saw the whole host /dev; the image now defines the ruleset the jails are created with.
• The CLI's data-pool pointer is rendered with the rc configuration and verified with it, so an upgrade no longer leaves the CLI unaware of the configured pool, and the jib helper that starts a VNET jail is part of the image instead of appearing only after the first create.
• Jails > Bastille Jails > Releases lists its rows again.

Applications

• podman run as root on the host finds the Applications store without any environment, so ps, exec, logs and inspect see the managed containers as they are.
• The Logs panel shows the container output without escape codes, and the name fields carry a pattern the browser accepts.

System

• IPMI System Event alerts work again, as in 15.0-U1.7: since 15.0 the alert source rejected every record in the system event log, so no hardware event became an alert and the middleware log filled with one warning per record every five minutes.

VM Compatibility

15.1 supports UEFI VMs. Existing GRUB and UEFI-CSM definitions remain visible, but cannot run or be edited. Their disks are not converted. Prepare and test UEFI boot while still on 15.0; see VM Firmware in FreeCORE 15.1.

Install or Update

RC1, RC2 and RC3 systems receive this candidate on the FreeCORE-15.1-STABLE train. Applications and Bastille jails installed on RC3 keep running unchanged.

From 15.0, the notes for RC1 still apply: update to 15.0-U1.3 or later first, and the move to FreeCORE-15.1-STABLE is one-way. Staying on FreeCORE-15.0-STABLE keeps a system on the maintained 15.0 line. Back up the system configuration and workload data before choosing 15.1.

The exact installer is FreeCORE-15.1-RC4.iso, with a detached signature and SHA-256 file. Use the installation guide's verification procedure with this exact filename and digest:

ca33d7a4a4be34bcf0eb0db6d80170ad0a2bea9860c43c8c6b4b58342b7f2ea3

See the published test evidence, website changelog and Getting Help when evaluating or reporting a problem.